From Loss
by ShadowThorne
Summary: Isshin suffers horrible loss and, years later, after a tragic accident threatens to take away the last thing that holds him together, he searches for a way to save his only child. Driven by a father's need, he finds himself going to great and desperate lengths in his efforts. A donor is created, but even an artificial life is hard to end when it becomes self-aware. Warnings within.
1. Chapter 1

**I should probably tell you guys that this isn't a valentine's story, the date is merely coincidence... It's actually been really long in the making. If you follow my tumblr, you may have seen teasers of the beginning quite some time ago.  
**

**But anyway, onto more important things!  
Before you begin, the warnings: This will not be a happy story. It will get better towards the end, but it will be a rough ride along the way. There is character death, the story is labeled as a tragedy for good reason. There is also plenty of sensitive material. That being said, there will be a second part to this and most of the really awful stuff is in the first, so it cheers up as it goes.**

**If you're still willing to give the story a chance, I hope you can enjoy!**

* * *

He stared in shock and horror, dark eyes wide and disbelieving. It had to be a lie, a horrible, cruel joke. He preyed that he would wake up any minute, that he would realize this had all been a nightmare, conjured from the darkest pits of his mind.

But nobody was laughing and he was very awake.

The doctor, still in sterile, white lab coat and pale, greenish-blue scrubs, looked back at him with dampened remorse as he delivered the grim news in a gentle monotone. Complications, he explained, too much bleeding. She'd been weak, sickly before she'd been put on bed rest. She'd been in pain when she'd been rushed to the hospital. Her condition had spread and they hadn't been able to prevent it. The doctor and nurses had done everything they could, but it just wasn't meant to be...

Isshin stood in the hallway for a long _long_ time, silent, motionless. He barely even breathed. There was a hole in his chest, and someone had poured hot led deep within him. It was cold and hard and solid and it sat in the pit of his stomach. All around him was quiet, even as hospital staff walked passed. Even as the doctor apologized and took his leave. All was silent.

Dead.

He only stirred when a small hand crept into his own, and a little voice spoke from his side.

"Daddy?" His boy, his only child, his beautiful son, asked in a somewhat eager tone. Isshin looked down at him with furrowed brows and a tight jaw. Wide, excited and wonder-filled brown eyes looked back up at him, "Can we go see mommy and my new baby sisters now?"

Isshin's shock finally broke. He crumpled to his knees in the middle of the hallway as all the sound rushed back in like a tidal wave. Pulling his son against his chest, sobs wracked his sturdy form. Hot tears wetted bright orange hair as little arms returned the embrace, a timid confusion in the boy's actions. He cried as he held his only child. His only family. His twin daughters would forever be unborn, and his beautiful wife would never return home.

After a few hours, Isshin collected himself enough to enter the delivery room, where his wife laid upon a hospital bed, covered by a thin, white blanket that had been pulled up to cover all but her face. The air smelled like antiseptic and a cold, underlying stress. The hospital staff had done well at cleaning it up, but Isshin could still see the evidence of the bleeding the doctor had mentioned. It wasn't like they always said; she didn't look peaceful. She looked pale, drawn. Her features were pinched, pulled with the strain and pain of contractions that served no purpose, of her body trying to push out two little girls that were already dead. She had died in pain, gasping and gritting her teeth until she'd grown too weak for even that.

Isshin bowed his head and hunched his shoulders, rested his forehead against hers, and cried. He'd left Ichigo out in the hall, with a nurse. He didn't now how to explain this to his five year old son. He didn't now how to tell the boy that his mother wouldn't be coming home with them, that he would never get to meet his sisters. He'd been so excited to see them, to help take care of them...

Three weeks prior, when Masaki had first been put on bed rest, Isshin and Masaki had laughed and looked at their wonderful little boy with pride in their eyes. They'd told him that it was a big brother's job to protect the little ones that came after him. Ichigo had been so proud and determined as he announced that he would be the best big brother he could be.

But he would never get the chance. Isshin and his son left the hospital, and returned to an empty, broken home.

The funeral was a few days later.

Dressed in black, Isshin's features were blank, devoid, as he watched the coffin being lowered into the ground. Never again would he see his beautiful wife; the love of his life. At his side, Ichigo held his hand tightly, his youth-rounded features pulled into a sad scowl, his orange brows furrowed. His bottom lip quivered ever so slightly, and quiet tears streaked his cheeks.

He'd been confused that night, when they'd finally left the hospital alone. He was a smart child though, he figured it out.

"_Mommy and my sissies aren't coming home, are they?"_

"_No, son...no they're not..."_

Isshin released the little fingers squeezed in his own and bent to pick his boy up, holding him in a tight embrace as he straightened, his dark eyes never leaving the coffin. Ichigo buried his face against the black suit jacket his daddy wore. He cried silent tears all through the ceremony. By the time Isshin was finally ready to leave the cemetery, Ichigo had worn himself out and cried himself to sleep in his father's arms.

Suddenly, Isshin was a single father and an only parent, with a five year old son to raise alone.

It wasn't an easy thing, but taking care of his son gave him purpose, gave him drive. He would take care of their beloved son, he would make sure his wife could concentrate on taking care of their infant daughters, rather than looking down and worrying about him and their still living child.

He concentrated on his work, and devoted himself to his child.

Years passed. Using his work as an outlet, Isshin's drive and efforts in the scientific community did not go unnoticed. By the time his son reached high school, he'd been promoted to chief researcher in the genetics laboratory he worked in. He worked directly below the most renowned and well known scientist in the country. His research was published in scientific journals around the world.

Ichigo grew into a handsome and intelligent young man. He attended the most advanced high school in the area and showed interests in perhaps following in his father's footsteps one day. He wasn't a perfect student, and he had a tendency to act rashly in certain situations, but he ranked high in his classes and seemed to have a bright future ahead of him.

It seemed that Isshin and his son had overcome the immense hardship of their loss; an only father that had struggled through and seemingly won out against crippling heartache and a teenage son that was well on his way to earning a happy and fulfilling life. Things weren't perfect, life wasn't easy, but overall, they prevailed. They learned to move on, to live and even find some semblance of their happiness back.

Each evening, after Ichigo had retreated to his room for the night so that he could get up early for school in the morning, Isshin took out his favorite portrait of his late wife. He'd twist the plain, gold band that never left his finger as he spoke to her in low tones. He told her about their day, told her about Ichigo's schooling and how he was growing up. He told her about his work and his research, about the weather, about his fears and worries, about anything and everything that came to mind. He took comfort in knowing that, if it were possible, Masaki smiled down on them, two little girls crowding around her legs as they looked over the rest of their family. He liked to imagine his daughters were as beautiful as their mother, like angels.

Every year, Ichigo and his father visited his mother's and sisters' grave together, where they laid out flowers for Masaki and wished the unborn twins a happy birthday, even if they didn't technically have one. During Ichigo's senior year, as the girls would have turned 12, the two made a little cake and blew out candles for them. _Almost teenagers_, Isshin had mused. There was a small, goofy smile on his scruffy features, but heartache in his voice, _like their big brother_. On their way home from the cemetery, they left the small cake to a stray dog on the streets, untouched.

One day, everything would come crashing down again, and the heart and mind can only take so much torment.

•••••••

The sun was warm overhead and a fresh breeze whispered through the town's edge where the small group walked. The air smelled of coming fall, of cooler weather on the horizon and fresh water from the river, whose side the street followed. Birds sang overhead, some taking to the sky in great flocks to begin their winter migration.

It was a normal day, like any other. Ichigo pushed a small smile across his handsome features as he walked at his friends' side. Like most teens, they goofed around and picked at one another the way friends usually do. The bag slung over one of his shoulders was weighed down my textbooks, but it was a work load he knew he'd only finish half of. Most of it would be left for the next morning, before his classes began. Sometimes his father got on his case about it, but he kept his grades up so his old man didn't lay it on him too harshly.

"Ichigo, I heard you earned the highest grade on our science exam," One of his friends mentioned, pushing wireframe glasses back up his straight nose. There was a sly little smirk on his lips though, "next to my score, of course."

Ichigo laughed, slinging his arm around the other boy's shoulders in a friendly way. The boy's girlfriend smiled and watched the two interact. "Sorry to drop you down a notch," Ichigo teased, "but I threw the two questions I missed on purpose."

The cocky expression on Ishida's features melted away as he glared at the orange haired boy. "Why would you do that? Are you trying to ruin your scholarship chances?"

It never occurred to any of them that what Ichigo said might not be true: they knew their friend had an almost absurd desire to stay out of the light. It was the only thing that kept him from being at the very top of the class. That, and his lack of attention to his homework. The teachers knew he didn't put much effort into school, and had quit trying to make him before he'd even reached high school.

Ichigo snorted a sound, pulling is arm away to let Ishida steal his girlfriend back. "I know we don't look all that much alike, but you do remember who my dad is, right?" He changed his voice to something haughty and joking as he continued, "Dr. Isshin Kurosaki, renowned geneticist, wrote the leading theory on cloning and creating artificial life." He laughed it off, dropping the cocky act to return to his normal, easy going demeanor. "I'll get into whatever college I want, if I decide to go."

"Prick." Ishida scoffed, though he meant it with the most love possible.

"Successful, well-known, handsome, rich prick." Ichigo amended. The friends around him laughed.

As they walked, talking amongst themselves, they passed by a small cemetery and Ichigo went quiet. Everyone knew why, and said nothing about it as brown eyes coasted over the elegant, iron gate, before dropping downward to watch the ground as they walked.

A small yelp from the other side of the street, near the bank of the river the street followed, pierced the air with a sharp ring. Ichigo's head whipped around to find the distressed animal. Brown eyes landed on a stray dog as it tried to limp away from a few young boys. Recognition lit behind his eyes as he realized it was the same stray that always seemed to be roaming around the cemetery his mother and sisters were buried in, the very same dog he and his father had fed Karin and Yuzu's cake to all those months ago.

"Hey!" Anger deepened his voice as he veered away from his friends and started to cross the street. "Leave the dog alo-"

There was a split second where brown eyes went impossibly wide, where everyone held their breaths as the screech of tires drown out Ichigo's reprimand. Then a sickening crunch and Ichigo was laying in the middle of the street, his textbooks scattered across the blacktop. Black skid marks smelled of burned rubber and everything was eerily still as his friends gasped in shock and stared. The stunned horror was broken when one of them screamed.

The driver of the car flung the door wide, climbed out and ran to the teenage boy's side. Everyone rushed into the middle of the road, screaming their friend's name. Ishida was the only one to stay collected enough to pull his cellphone from his pocket and dial for an ambulance.

Ichigo didn't move.

Isshin received a phone call that evening that nearly killed him.

He flew from the building his office was located in so quickly that he forgot to grab his jacket and the papers he'd been working on. He left his lab equipment running, his computer on and running through test scenarios that he would have normally locked down and kept under secure supervision. His boss shouted after him, confused and angry. Isshin didn't hear him.

His hands shook, trembled violently, as he tried to stick his car key into the ignition. Tires squealed as he peeled from the parking lot. Half way to the hospital, flashing lights and sirens warned him that he was going far above the speed limit. Breathing in panicked, jerky breaths, Isshin glanced at his rearview mirror, then flipped his four-way marker lights on to let the cop know he'd seen him, and kept going. He couldn't stop. His son...his only child... The cop could arrest him when they made it to the ER.

When he pulled to a rough, hurried stop in front of the ER entrance, threw the car in park and yanked the keys from the ignition, he climbed from the driver's seat with his hands raised in a surrendering way. The cop screeched to a halt right behind him, climbing from his car with his hand on his gun.

"I'm sorry...I'm sorry..." Isshin chanted over and over, "My son...he's...I'm sorry..." he backed away, toward the hospital doors, before he turned, rounded the front of his car, and sprinted to the building. The cop of course followed after him, but the gun wasn't drawn and handcuffs stayed secured to his belt.

Isshin hurried to the front desk, gave his name and waited impatiently as the woman behind the counter looked up the room number he was looking for. One of Ichigo's friends ran up to him, grabbed the sleeve of his lab coat and looked up at him with wide, violet eyes. The evidence of tears streaked her pretty features and her dark hair was mussed from a rough past hour.

Isshin stared down at her in horror, frozen and unable to move. She shook her head slightly, and her voice trembled as she pushed out hoarse, whispering words, "Th-they don't know... H-he might not..."

"Oh no...oh god..." Isshin trembled as the young lady turned, still holding his sleeve, and began leading him down the hall. His steps were uneven, strengthless as he trailed behind her and toward the room his son occupied, "Not my boy too..."

Ichigo's friends filed from the room as Isshin entered. They watched through a small window as their friend's father spoke briefly with the doctor, before moving to his son's bedside. He bent over his son's prone form, listened to the force air hissing from the machines nearby, to the frail beep of the EKG monitor that showed his child's heart was still beating painfully. He brushed riotous, orange bangs from the young man's face and looked at the black and blues of deep bruising that marred usually tan, healthy skin.

A thin tube had been fed through Ichigo's nose and down his airway, and the doctor explained that he'd quit breathing in the ambulance on the way to the ER. Now, his chest only rose and fell because the machine beside his bed mechanically filled his lungs with oxygen. His heart was still beating on its own, for now, but the prognosis was shaky at best. The odds were against Ichigo, and Isshin listened in a lifeless way as the doctor apologized and told him that it was unlikely his only child would ever wake up.

Eventually, he dropped bonelessly into a chair that he'd pulled closer to the bed, and stared unblinkingly, unseeingly at his comatose son. Ichigo's friends came in, said a few things, gave their condolences, and cried. They told him what happened, they told him they should have been paying more attention. They apologized over and over. Eventually, they took their leave and left a lonely old man to grieve over his dying son.

A week came and went. Doctor after doctor was consulted. Isshin called every professional he knew. He spoke with every medically brilliant mind he'd met in his line of work. Specialists came to run tests and talk about possible options and treatments. None of it was very promising.

One night, after leaving the hospital, Isshin drove down the river road that passed by the cemetery his wife and daughters rested in. On a whim, unable to face his empty house for another night, he pulled the car over on the side of the road, and sat for nearly an hour. Broken down and worn out, he didn't enter the cemetery. He couldn't face his late wife, he couldn't tell her what had happened, what he'd allowed to happen. So he sat there, alone, too emotionally and psychologically drained to even conjure up the energy needed for tears.

His scruffy features were drawn and tired, haggard. His dark eyes were red rimmed and sunken. The stubble on his jaw, greying with the stress of raising a child on his own, was thicker and more obvious than normal. He simply sat in his car and stared out the windshield, until a low whimper caught his attention.

Slowly, tiredly turning to look out the driver side window, he watched as a mangy, skinny stray dog limped toward his car, keeping one leg lifted and its meager weight off a week old broken limb. He recognized the pitiful looking mutt. And he knew it was the one Ichigo's friends had been talking about. His son had nearly died for this dog. His son was still fighting for his life, because he'd wanted to help this dog.

Climbing from the car, Isshin knelt on the sidewalk, hand held out, and the dog limped up to him, cautious with its tail tucked and its head down. He didn't have any food to give the poor thing, but he had a warm car, and a warm, empty house.

The poor thing looked terrified the whole of the car ride, but it laid across the backseat quietly, trembling slightly. Its nose twitched and wiggled the way only dog noses do as it sniffed what sat before it. By the time Isshin had made it to his house, the dog had laid its head on crossed paws and had been lolled into a light slumber.

Isshin smiled a frail expression at it, climbing from the car to open the backdoor. He didn't let the dog jump from the car, but rather picked the mutt up and carried it inside. He called a vet, set up an appointment to have the injured stray looked at, and fed the poor thing something more wholesome than cake this time.

After having the dog for a few days, Isshin decided on his next trip to the hospital, he would bring it along. He rolled the driver's side window down as he parked outside the hospital entrance. The dog sat quietly in the driver's seat, one leg wrapped in a sturdy cast, and waited patiently as its new owner disappeared from sight.

Everyday for weeks, Isshin visited his son in the hospital. The hospital staff began to recognize him. Ichigo's friends, when they happened to be visiting at the same time, began to notice that he didn't always have a fresh change of clothes on. The usual button up shirts he wore under his lab coat while at work were always wrinkled and stiff. His tie was always loose, like it hadn't been untied in weeks. He hardly ate, hardly took care of himself. He looked old and tired.

No one knew it, but he quit preying to his wife.

Eventually, he was expected to come back to work. He didn't. He lost his job. His son's condition never changed, not for the worst, but certainly not for the better either. When he would finally drag himself from Ichigo's side, the dog would still be sitting in the car, despite that it could have left at any time. He would drive to his house, a building he no longer saw as his home, where he would spend another silent, lonely night in worry and a sleep that didn't bring peace. In the morning, he would get up, feed the stray, and start all over again.

A month went by. In that time, Dr. Isshin Kurosaki had hardly said a word to anyone. He did nothing but visit his son in the hospital. His research on genetics and human biology was left uncompleted and inconclusive, most of which had been left in his lab at institute he had worked in. But he couldn't care less. Everything he'd lived for, his reason for continuing, had been taken from him.

The doctors began discussing other options with him. Ichigo's time was running out, they said, his chances of ever awakening and recovering were lowering with each passing week.

It was killing him to sit back and watch his son deteriorate in a hospital bed, hooked up to machines to keep him alive. As he sat in that room, staring at his only child for hours at a time, something hard began to knot in his stomach. It was cold and fierce and unyielding.

Twisting the plain gold band he still and always would wear around his finger, Isshin knew he couldn't let his son die. He'd been helpless when his wife and daughters had been taken from him. He couldn't let that happen to his boy as well.

Nearly four months after a freak accident had essentially taken Isshin's only surviving family from him, he strode into the hospital, looking haggard and worn, but more awake than he had in recent weeks. After speaking with Ichigo's doctors, and learning that his chances for ever waking up were nearing the 15% line -chances for a real recovery even lower- Isshin made a decision. His son would be coming home with him.

Arrangements were made, and Ichigo was carefully loaded into the back of an ambulance, strapped to the bed he would never leave and still hooked up to the machines that helped him breath and fed his body nutrients, and driven to Isshin's house, the home Ichigo had grown up at. The young man's bedroom was converted into an in home hospital room. At first, Isshin had protested, not wanting some stranger in his house, but after some discussing and some convincing, he agreed to have a nurse visit everyday. The woman would come in, bathe his son, check on the equipment supporting him, change his bedding and IV feeds when necessary.

Four months after Ichigo's accident, he finally went home. His friends showed up at the house the very next day, and Isshin welcomed them with a quiet greeting in a rough voice. They played with the dog he'd taken in, and went up to their friend's room to visit with Ichigo. But Ichigo wasn't awake to see any of it. He would never wake up.

Less than a week after having his son brought back home, Isshin showed up at his place of employment for the first time since the accident. Thinking he was finally trying to get ahold of his life again, his boss offered to give him his job back. Isshin turned him down, marched passed him to where his office had been. He swiped his keycard, mildly surprised the code still worked, and pulled the hard drive from his computer.

He pulled all his secure files from the safe he kept under his desk, carefully putting the folders in his shoulder bag along with the hard drives. After collecting all the research and notes he'd left behind, everything he might have use for, he left without a word.

His coworkers and colleagues would never see him again. He would eventually disappear from the scientific community altogether.

Upon returning home, Isshin sent the nurse away, leaving him alone with his comatose child. He set about converting the master bedroom he'd once shared with his wife into a small office where he could continue working on his theories and research, if not actual experiments and tests. He installed a lock on the door, so that it could all be kept private, even when he wasn't home to watch the nurse.

As the agreement with the hospital had stipulated, Isshin had given her a key to his house, so that she could let herself in to keep up with the care of his son. Isshin wasn't particularly happy about it, but he tolerated it so that he could keep Ichigo at home with him. He wasn't outright rude or mean to the woman, but he didn't go out of his way to be overly friendly either. Tired and worn down, he didn't care enough to pretend.

He took to sleeping on the couch in the sitting room, and the stray dog would curl up on his feet every night. The nurse, nearly a month into her new job of making daily house calls, noted how even though Dr. Kurosaki still looked rough and depressed, there was a spark of new life in his dark eyes. Being a medical professional, she took notice of his health during her visits. He'd been eating more again, and sleeping better, even if it was on the couch. At first, she chocked it up to the comfort of having his sick, injured child at home with him, after having raised the child alone for so long.

In private, Isshin continued his work. At first, he merely picked up where he left off; redeveloping his theories on genes and synthesizing artificial DNA. He worked himself into exhaustion most days, living on coffee and microwaveable meals. When he wasn't in his bedroom-turned-lab, he was sitting at his son's side.

Modern medicine hadn't advanced enough to save his child, but desperation was often the catalyst needed to spur amazing developments. Or terrible ones.

Some nights, when he couldn't sleep, Isshin would pull his theories from his new office and sit at Ichigo's side, reading the papers aloud as a way to both keep Ichigo company and preoccupy his restless mind. He would sit on the side of Ichigo's bed, careful of where the cords and tubes laid across the mattress, and brush slowly growing, dry orange hair from his boy's features as he read. The mutt he'd taken in, still nameless, would lay in the hallway beside the door, like it knew better than to disturb the grieving, desperate man.

One day, late into the morning and nearing mid-day, Isshin was in his makeshift lab when the nurse arrived. She pulled her key from her pocket, and was surprised when it didn't work. She frowned, realizing the lock had been changed. Confused, she knocked on the door. Waiting a few moments without an answer, she knocked again, louder this time. A few minutes later, the door was unlocked but not pulled open for her.

She pushed it open in time to see Isshin turning back toward the hall again, muttering various equations to himself as he thought aloud. She frowned harder, a bit of worry creasing her brow, but headed toward Dr. Kurosaki's son's room.

After completing her daily routine, she peeked from the silent room and down the hall. The door the elder Kurosaki had disappeared through was closed. Crossing the hall and to the door, she knocked quietly.

"Dr. Kurosaki?" A grumbled, deep voice was her answer, before Isshin called out an inquiry. "I've finished for the day..."

The door was pulled open, a bit quickly, and Isshin stepped through the doorway, shutting the portal behind himself as he went. "Excellent. Thank you." He dismissed, heading toward his boy's room again.

"M-may I ask what you've been up to, Doctor?" The nurse asked. Seeing as no one ever saw much of Isshin, it had inadvertently become her job to not only watch over Ichigo, but keep an eye on his father as well. She was assigned with keeping watch for anything that could endanger the comatose patient, and that included the mental health of his parent. They'd seen crazy things happen before...

"Working." Isshin answered, turning into his boy's room. The stray dog trailed behind him, and the nurse noted that the cast had been removed and the dog's previously broken leg had been re-shaved. She assumed Isshin had made a return trip to the vet's at some point while she'd been away. He wasn't exactly supposed to leave Ichigo home alone, but it wasn't as if the boy would be going anywhere.

When the nurse remained quiet, Isshin turned to look over his shoulder at her, fondly threading his fingers through orange, freshly washed hair. His features softened a bit. "It keeps my mind busy and gives me something to focus on," He explained in a rough voice. She didn't need to know what he was working on, that he was looking into ways to save his only child. Even if she asked, and he decided to answer truthfully, it was likely she wouldn't understand most of what his scientific jargon was about anyway.

Not long later, the nurse left and Isshin was once more left alone with his child and the mutt he'd adopted, alone in a house that felt far more empty than it should have. Locked away in his home, Isshin lived off his savings -a rather vast account, considering how well off he'd been from his work in the scientific community. He only left when an empty fridge and cupboards demanded it.

Hidden away in his makeshift workspace, he worked. Soon enough, papers and notebooks were stacked on all the flat surfaces of what had once been the bedroom he'd shared with his wife. The walls, once a soft color, were marked up and scribbled on like chalkboards that couldn't be cleaned. Needing more light, he'd pulled the shades off the lamps and left the bulbs bare. It cast harsh shadows around the room while he bustled about, checking and rechecking numbers and calculations, redrawing graphs, scribbling out theories and starting anew.

Eventually, he ran out of room and his work began to spill over into other rooms of the house. He'd be sitting at the kitchen table when a thought flittered through his mind, and use a knife to scratch it into the wooden surface. The mirror and tile in the bathroom had soap drawings and scribbles all over them, from where his mind would be busy at work while he was in there.

Then one day, he called his nurse and asked her to pick up a news paper for him on her way. Taken off guard by the request, especially considering he'd never called her before, she did as asked. After handing it to him, she went about her duties, then left like usual. But how could she miss the evidence of his work all over the house? She'd thought, like he'd told her, that it was just a way to keep himself focused and busy. He was well known, she knew what he did for a living. Perhaps he'd taken to working from home, and still had papers and theories that needed completed. But that afternoon, after she left Isshin's house, she reported back into the hospital.

She told her superiors that Isshin Kurosaki was beginning to show somewhat alarming signs. After describing his behaviors, they told her to simply keep an eye on him, and that if he became more erratic, to call them or the police immediately.

And so things continued. Months passed by. Isshin marked them on a calendar he kept pinned up on one of the walls in his bedroom. The longer things went on, the more the situation continued to weigh on him. Time was passing, and the chances of his son's survival were slimming. Ichigo's recovery was slipping through his fingers and his dead wife would never forgive him for letting their only surviving child to die before his time. Ichigo was still young, he had had such a bright future...

Then came the tests. The computer he'd brought with him from his place of employment, a laptop that he could take back and forth, wasn't large enough to run the kind of virtual experiments he really wished he could run, but it was a start. It would run numbers for him, and calculate answers.

While letting the program run, he'd grab the newspapers he'd bought or had brought to him. He threw out the majority of the paper, the adds and articles, and kept only home, office and location listings. He crossed off location after location. He needed someplace bigger, someplace he could further his work, and, if it ever progressed far enough, he would need a place secluded and private enough to conduct his experiments. He would need someplace that he and his son and his equipment would be safe and unbothered at.

Running his hand through his greying hair, Isshin chewed his lip as he plugged numbers into his laptop. He'd begun running test scenarios, though nothing major, and the results were far from what he was hoping for.

"Mr. Kurosaki..?"

Isshin jerked in surprise, looking up from where he'd been seated on the edge of a couch cushion. The screen of his laptop lit up his scruffy features, making them look all the more drawn and tired. His eyes looked glassy and red rimmed and loose sheets of paper were scattered around the coffee table and the across the couch beside him.

The nurse stepped through the open doorway, worry on her features. "Your door was open..." She paused, frowned, "Have you been up all night?"

Isshin typed a few more keys on his computer, than started to stand. Blinking harshly, he scrubbed a hand across his bristled chin and kind of looked around for a moment. His dark eyes followed the movement of his dog as the animal quietly padded in through the open doorway behind the nurse. "I guess I have."

"Are you alright, Isshin?" She asked quietly, really beginning to doubt the poor man's stability.

"Yeah, yeah...fine." Isshin assured, crossing the space and into the kitchen where he started a fresh pot of coffee. "Just busy. I'm so close... we're almost there...almost..." He said, and it sounded like he spoke more to himself than the nurse slowly closing his front door.

A few minutes later, his computer chimed an alert that signaled that program had run its course and the numbers were ready to read. Isshin dropped what he was doing, leaving the coffee pot sitting on the counter while the machine started brewing, nothing under it to catch steaming, hot liquid.

The nurse half panicked and raced across the kitchen to put the glass pot under the spout, keeping the mess to a minimum. Looking back to the sitting room, she watched the older Kurosaki bend to stare at his laptop. His eyes raced from side to side, reading faster than she thought seemed right, but he was so used to seeing this set of numbers, he knew exactly what he was looking for by then.

To his surprise, for the first time, he found it.

Straightening in a quick jerk of surprised motion, he raised his hands, dragged them down his features. One settled over his mouth as he shook his head slightly and paced a short circle around the coffee table. Then he raced back to the computer, muttering things the nurse really didn't know about with words she'd never even heard before. It all sounded like it had something to do with his research though, so she dismissed it and wandered down the hall to check on her patient.

After entering a few keys, Isshin set the program to run the exact same test with the exact same data again. He stood, took a deep breath, and went back to the kitchen for that coffee he had been making. He hardly even noticed the puddle of dark liquid cooling on his counter, from where he'd forgotten to put the pot in place to collect the fresh coffee.

Nearly a half hour later, as he stared into space and sipped at now cold coffee, the computer chimed again and Isshin dropped his mug in the sink as he pushed away from the counter. He rounded the low table and again began reading the results of his tests. Another positive.

Tears welled in Isshin's dark eyes for the first time in months, but rather than pain and loathing and sorrow, they were happy and disbelieving. He collapsed to his couch, legs wobbling and unable to support him, and hung his head as he cried. Finally, there was hope for his son.

The nurse found him passed out on the couch, the deep set scowl that normally adorned his tired features lightened a touch. She pulled a blanket over him and glanced at the laptop. She found very little she could recognize, and shrugged it off. Job done, she took her leave and pulled the door closed behind her.

Reporting into the hospital and the doctor that kept track of young Ichigo's records, she notified nothing new; no changes in the patient and no continuation of the father's erratic behavior.

The next day when she made her rounds, she arrived only to find the door again locked. Knocking earned her nothing. After standing outside for a few minutes, she pulled her phone out and began dialing the number Isshin had listed as his emergency contact on Ichigo's file, only to freeze as black smoke and the smell of burning drifted through the air from somewhere near the back of the house.

Gasping, she called the police instead.

After breaking the door down, the fire department found the master bedroom and everything that had been inside destroyed. Half the ceiling had collapsed by the time they arrived. The kitchen and coffee tables had been dragged in there as well, feeding the fire that had been set. Scouring the house, they found no sign of Isshin and Ichigo's bed lay empty, all the equipment he'd been hooked up to gone as well.

A manhunt began for the missing scientist and his comatose son. The house was investigated and photographed, evidence collected. After consulting a specialist, the few things Isshin hadn't burned with the rest of the research he'd left behind seemed to point toward interests in furthering the work he'd previously been known for; human genetics and synthesizing living tissue. It took a while for anyone to piece it together.

Dr. Isshin Kurosaki was attempting to recreate the vital organs that had been damaged in Ichigo's accident; a desperate father trying to save his dying son.

After days of driving, stopping only to refuel his vehicle and get just enough sleep so that he wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel, Isshin arrived at his new house. It was bought up front, in cash; a run down little cabin an hour from the nearest village, four and half from the nearest major city. Surrounded by wooded land and accessible only via a dirt road, it was far removed and the exact opposite of the house he'd owned while he'd been raising his child.

The inside, much like the outside, was worn and had seen better days, but it had a full basement and that was the only part Isshin really cared about. The seclusion was perfect, and the basement could be converted into his new lab, giving him far more space than he'd had before. The rest of the house only had to keep him sheltered and store his food.

Opening up the back door to his car, he let the dog out, before ever so gently pulling his motionless, dying teenage son from the backseat. With care that showed how deeply he loved his boy, Isshin carried Ichigo through the door of their new home and carefully navigated the stairs, down into the basement. He'd already dragged a gurney into the main room of the underground level, and that's where he gently set his boy down at, careful and precise with how he set the machinery up around him. The gurney, more of a metal table on wheels with a thin cushion made of blankets, was only temporary while Isshin acquired the rest of what he'd need.

In the coming days, Isshin made frequent trips from his new house. He pulled strings, used fake names and IDs, and of course his vast bank account to acquire the things he needed as he set up his lab. Machinery, beakers, lab equipment, specimen jars, tools, a centrifuge and more quickly began accumulating upon the sterile, metal tables Isshin pushed along the sides of the vast space. In a smaller room of the basement, what had once been a fairly large cellar and pantry, Isshin pushed the table his child laid upon. This room, he set up more like a living space. Shelves that had once held canned and dried foods were filled with books, magazines, and files from his research. He also set out all the photos of his late wife and Ichigo, even the ultrasounds images of his unborn, twin daughters.

For the first time in months, for the first time since Ichigo had been hit by a car on the way home from school, Isshin dared to prey to his wife. It was a deep, profound apology and a short, simple promise. He spent the night after finally acquiring the last of what he would need sitting at his boy's side, holding his child's hand and lovingly stroking bright orange hair.

Desperation and heartache drove him. The need to save his only family, the only thing he truly cared for, to right a horrible, _horrible_ wrong pushed him to dire, unthinkable lengths. In all his well-meant intentions, Isshin was left blinded to a simple and brutal truth; machines and medical technology kept the body alive, but Ichigo was already dead.

Isshin started with the dog. Too trusting, the way man's best friend often was, the stray the scientist had taken in held still and cooperated as Isshin re-shaved its leg again and pushed the needle of a syringe under its smooth flesh. Drawing blood, Isshin went about his work.

He put the extracted blood into vials, set them in the centrifuge and left them to spin, separated all the various components that made up the liquid of life. After hours of allowing the blood to separate from plasma, Isshin put a sample on a slide and studied it under a microscope. He extracted the DNA, spent days manipulating it, weeks.

He spent every waking moment working on creating and growing new tissues; muscle, ligament, organ. He recorded his results, put the samples in a clear-front refrigerator that he'd modified to serve his purposes. When he ran out of clean, healthy samples, he re-shaved the dog's leg and drew more blood. Eventually, he found he needed other samples; tissue samples, muscle, bone, and he mixed a homemade sedative for his unfortunate friend.

Trusting of the human that had taken it in, the dog easily enough ate the tainted food given it. Isshin didn't have the medical background required for things like surgery, but he was intelligent, and his scientific mind already knew the basics of such procedures.

When the dog awakened, its previously broken leg was missing from the elbow down. It whimpered as it stumbled, still drowsy from the drugs and off balance now too. Isshin picked it up, careful not to jostle the bandaged stump of what was left of its limb, and moved it over to a cushy pile of towels and blankets where it could comfortably lay down in the corner of his lab. The dog's leg, what was left of it as Isshin took what he needed, was kept wrapped up in the freezer.

Over the coming months, the poor animal lost far more than its leg. Its tail was the next to go, but still it followed Isshin around his new house and the basement after relearning to walk with only three legs. It lost weight, grew sickly as its master continued to use the animal in his experiments.

After months of hard work and determination, backed by a career's worth in years of experience, Isshin managed the impossible. Nearly a year after his boy had been struck by a car and fallen into a coma, months after he'd kidnapped his own child and ran away with him, in a clear, cylindrical tank filled with nutrient-rich, sterile fluid, he grew his stray friend a new leg. The limb was under developed and hairless, the veins and blood vessels close to the thin skin, but it was a recognizable limb, a dog's leg.

Isshin shook with his excitement. He'd done what no one had been able to do before, in a basement with stolen and modified equipment no less. Scientific breakthrough aside, the development renewed his hope, his vigor. After pulling the artificially grown limb from its protective, growth tank, he tested the mobility of the joints, the workings of the ligaments. He drew blood samples and inspected them under a microscope. He took skin scrapings and tissue cultures and everything he gathered from the artificially grown leg pointed towards a normal, functioning unit.

Overjoyed, Isshin turned towards his dog. "Come here, pup." He said in a horse, quiet voice, a smile on his scruffy features and lessening the dark circles under his eyes a bit.

From the corner, where the mound of soft bedding remained for the entirety of Isshin's time at the abandoned old house, the sickly dog struggled to stand under its own power. It had no tail to wag, but what was left of the muscle that normally anchored the tail near the spine wiggled a bit as the animal hung its head and hobbled across the lab. Scars marked its body, where Isshin had cut it open and took from it other samples; a kidney, a few ribs, part of one lung, a strip of muscle from near the spine. Torn ears hung limp, drool dripping from cut up, scarred features, but still the dog listened to its master.

"Ready for a new leg, finally?" Isshin asked as he settled his hand on the dog's head. There was nothing cruel in his touch, despite the tattered state he'd slowly worked the dog into. The animal was panting in wet breaths just from crossing the room, but it hardly flinched as a long needle was pushed under its mostly numb flesh. Within minutes, it was out cold, laying on its side upon a metal lab table.

Isshin donned rubber gloves and a medical mask. He sanitized all his tools and equipment, and began surgery. After hours of surgical grafting, of fusing old muscle and ligament with new and fitting the joint of the new leg into the old socket, and careful sewing, Isshin stepped back and his dog had a new leg. A line of ragged but clean stitching marked where the old body ended and the new limb began. It was off colored, a little thinner than the dog's other, natural legs from being under used and so less muscled, but by everything Isshin could see, it was a functioning replacement and a step towards his ultimate goal.

A leg wasn't nearly as complicated as the things he would need to create for his son, but it was a start.

So much went wrong. Despite having made the hour drive to the nearest small town for all the over the counter antibiotics he could buy and creating some of his own, the dog's body began rejecting the new limb. Infection set in, putrefying the skin on the surface and eating it away from the inside. The leg started to wither and rot before the dog could even bear weight with it.

Angry and distraught, stressed out and not in his right mindset, Isshin recorded the happenings, photographed the incision and the infection, and once more knocked his dog out upon a cold metal table. He amputated the dying limb, setting it aside for further study, and re-sutured the dog, three-legged again. He carried the weak animal back to the corner and once more laid the stray out upon the thick bundle of blankets and towels, before returning to the artificially grown, dead leg.

Muttering to himself, he shook his head as he tore the leg apart with surgical precision and scientific coldness. He flayed the thin, almost translucent skin away, pinned ligaments and tendons back as he cut away sickly muscle. Upon dissecting the leg, he found evidence of new, fresh growth among the rotted, dying old, which meant the dog's body had actually been beginning to accept the limb. But that left Isshin to wonder what had gone wrong. Perhaps it had simply been bad luck: infections happened even in hospitals, where professionals were doing this sort of thing.

After cataloguing all the information he could glean from the failed experiment, Isshin dropped the dissected limb in a large specimen jar, filling it with preservative alcohol, and sealed the lid. He labeled the large jar with a number that matched the number on the file filled with the leg's info, then slid the jar into place upon the shelving that lined two walls of his lab, amongst all his other attempts and preserved specimens. He had quite the extensive collection going.

And, at the end of every night - or day, or sometimes after several days, when he couldn't keep going any longer and his body and mind demanded he put his work on pause - Isshin would lock down whatever he'd been doing and unlock the door to what had become his son's room.

Ichigo's bed took up the center of the room, wires and cords and tubes stretching to one wall from the machines the teen was still connected to in order to keep his body alive. An old, military style cot had been dragged into the room and pushed up against one wall. That was were Isshin had taken to sleeping; in the room with his comatose child, where the photos of his wife and a little, orange haired, lively boy looked over him.

"Don't give up on me, Ichigo, my son." Isshin muttered as he sat upon the edge of the boy's bed. He tenderly ran his hand through orange hair, looking down upon what should have been peaceful, sleep-like features. Instead, Ichigo looked pale and sickly, drawn. His skin was dry and sallow and his condition worsened the longer he lay there, lifeless but for the machines that kept him breathing and fed nutrients to his body. "Your old man will figure this out..." And Isshin closed his eyes, pretending like he could see that bright smile again, as tears slid from under his eyelids to streak his grizzled, worn features.

Having no other choice, Isshin started over. He couldn't give up, wouldn't. So he tore down the tank he'd used to grow the leg in, cleaned it, rebuilt it and started anew. In other tanks around the basement turned laboratory, be began work on other experiments.

With a heavy heart, he turned toward himself and his son. He took blood samples from Ichigo and healthier samples from himself, and began human trials.

Notebook after notebook, file cabinets full, were filled with barely legible, hand written notes and theories and diagrams. Like with all experimental research, there were many failures. Quickly added to his macabre collection, deformed, dysfunctional organs floated in sealed jars. Dead tissue samples pressed and scraped to slides were labeled and filed away.

Isshin worked day and night. He eventually began the process of reattaching another new leg to his dog. Before preforming the surgery, he once more inspected the limb. It was again off colored, the skin not quite as tough as the dog's natural flesh, nor as pigmented, but it was still a healthy, functioning, artificially grown limb. He theorized that if this graft took, and lasted longer than the first attempt, the limb would fill out and the skin would toughen with use. He guessed the lack of pigment and durability, as well as the under developed muscle was simply a product of the environment in which it had been grown.

When it came time to make another attempt at returning the dog's missing leg, Isshin administered the drugs he'd made to knock the animal out and began cutting the creature open. He attached the new leg, lined up the joints, fused new muscle with old, attached nerve endings and sinew and re-closed the wound.

A few hours later, after being carried to its bed in the corner, the dog reawakened. It refused to put weight on the new limb, but it had been an extensive surgery and was no doubt sore. The sensitivity should have begun to wane with time.

No such thing happened, however. It was created from the dog's very own DNA, synthesized from the dog's own flesh and blood, but like before, the limb began to reject.

Baffled, Isshin turned back to his theories and his other research. There had to have been something he was missing. Studying some of the other, still growing specimens in their tanks, floating in sterile, nutrient rich fluids, he began to wonder if the failures had something to do with the environment they were created in. Or perhaps the process?

His brilliant mind scrambled for possible explanations and solutions. The things he was creating were alive and stable, healthy until attached. They were essentially already complete, and therefore didn't need a host body, only the conditions they'd been created in. Maybe he was thinking on a scale too small, too narrowly. Maybe he needed to widen his vision.

He decided to go about his goal with a different approach. Once more using samples of the dog's DNA, he began attempting to grow a full, living, breathing animal, a completely separate dog. Cloning was nothing new in the scientific community. He'd been doing research and writing papers on various cloning techniques for years. But attempting something to that scale in a basement, a homemade laboratory, was a stretch. But then, so had creating new organs and limbs, yet he'd accomplished that. For his son, he'd do anything.

Using the same techniques he'd used while growing the leg and other various organs, he began attempting to grow an actual puppy, something with the dog's same genes. If he could grow a host, perhaps he could then harvest the limb from his creation.

His first several attempts were complete, horrifying failures. The things he grew in his lab were not dogs, but monstrosities. Most couldn't even claim life, and the few that had, had died almost immediately after being severed from their artificial umbilical cords and brought from their grow-tanks.

But most of his work was trial and error. Unlike science in the usual sense, when it was open to the criticism and spectators, he didn't have a set of moral obligations he had to follow. There was no questioning whether he _should_ do something. His child depended upon this, upon his success. So Isshin _would_ do it, no matter the cost.

The more he worked, the more clones he produced, the closer he came to bringing a second dog to life. His creations were more and more like the first. They began living longer, even outside their specialized tanks. Some even made it so far as developing sight, hearing, the ability to differentiate between stimuli.

And then he produced one hairless, colorless little pup. It looked more like a naked rat than a puppy, but when he set it upon the sterile lab table, he could feel body heat through his rubber gloves. He could feel its pulse under his fingertips. Like a newborn creature, its eyes were still closed and after a few minutes of trying to figure out what was what, it began to cry as it took its first breath of real air.

Isshin's face lit in a wide, overjoyed smile.

He had managed to clone his dog, in his basement.

That night, he placed the little puppy with the stray he'd taken in, watching as it nestled among the blankets. The dog seemed a bit curious, but also a bit wary of the new animal, and watched its every move.

Tired and at his limit, both physically and mentally, Isshin retired for the night. In the morning, he awoke to find the puppy not only up and moving on its own, despite a newborn-like state only the night before, but furred and snarling at his dog. Short, colorless hair coated the animal in fuzz. Teeth had grown, its eyes not only opened, but had lost the blueish of newborn and gained a brittle, brownish color. It had developed, grown, _aged_, overnight.

Isshin was amazed. This seemed to be exactly what he needed. He could perhaps grow a host, something that grew and developed quickly, far quicker than a normal rate, and harvest from it what he needed to save his son. He'd finally found his answer, or so he thought.

Unable to wait, fearful of how much time had already passed, he began human attempts as the puppy explored its older clone. As he worked, a few snarling yips and growls marked as the two animals got to know each other. Despite being a copy of the older mutt, the clone seemed more aggressive, more confident and also more out going. It stumbled around the lab, sniffing and exploring and letting out little growls at anything that moved or surprised it.

All the while, Isshin half worked as he watched it explore. Eventually, he succeeded in growing a human fetus. The tank acting as an artificial womb, he monitored the fetus's development closely. If the growing human clone was anything like the dog, it would develop at a swift pace and seeing how there was no natural labour and birthing process, when the baby was ready, Isshin would have to be there to pull it from the tank and cut the umbilical cord.

In the meantime, while the baby was growing, he focused on the puppy. Dogs had a shorter lifespan than humans and so growth rate already accelerated, the clone quickly grew into adulthood. Only a couple months after its artificial birth, the pup reached maturity.

Knowing he was about to attempt harvesting the pup's leg for his real dog, he began growing a second clone in a tank nearby the human fetus's. When the day came that Isshin determined the puppy was ready and physically old enough, Isshin killed it himself and cut its leg from its body. There was no remorse in his actions, only a need driven sense of duty.

He once again attached a new leg to the dog he'd been preforming his experiments on. A week went by and the second dog clone was ready. He pulled it from the tank as it squirmed in his hands. The new leg, still pale and a little on the thin side, with fur that was nearly white while the dog's natural fur was much darker, was still healthy and attached. The dog had yet to begin putting weight on its new limb, but the surgical transplant hadn't been rejected this time, not yet at least, and the dog seemed to be in an acceptable condition.

Later that night, after he'd called it quits for the evening and retired to be with his sick child, Isshin was jerked from his sleep by the sharp sound of barking. Pulling himself from his cot and nearly overturning it in his startlement, he hurried from the back room of his lab and entered the main area of the basement. He found his stray backed into a corner, barking at the smaller clone of itself. The puppy, despite its swift growth, was still less than half the dog's size, but it faced its older clone with bared teeth, raised hackles and hunched shoulders.

Frowning, he strode up to the aggressive little pup and picked the thing up. It squirmed in his hold, growling at him as it struggled to turn and face him. Isshin shook his head and tapped its nose, issuing a firm, "No." as he walked away.

The stray relaxed as its clone was pulled away, and returned to its bed of folded blankets and towels. Isshin brought the colorless pup into the back room with him and laid back down on his cot with it. It seemed happy enough to curl at his side and he frowned all the harder, wondering what had angered the little thing so.

Only a few days later, the event Isshin had been patiently waiting for finally occurred. Breaking the sterile, airtight seal on his tank, he broke the womb-like conditions within and pulled forth a small, albino baby, a clone of his beloved son. A smile tried to break the darkness of his features as he held the baby and tiny but fitful and unhappy cries broke the silence of his lab.

Drawn by its cries, the stray dog sat at Isshin's side, looking up at the baby on the table, while the smaller clone sat at the scientist's other side, ears pinned back but not growling its aggression this time. After a moment of marveling at the baby, of reveling in holding a child again, Isshin oh so carefully laid it upon a cloth swaddled lab table and began a physical check. Throughout the whole of the exam, the baby cried and fussed in its tiny, brittle voice.

Like the clones of the dog, the baby was sallow and pale, its skin an ashen white. What little hair it had at birth was also white, fine and silken. Isshin frowned slightly as he noted that the baby's nails were dark, like little bruises on pale fingers. But its lungs were clearly functioning well and its temperature seemed normal. Aside from its odd coloring, most likely an error in the genetics Isshin had tampered with, it seemed like a normal, healthy baby boy.

Isshin was weighing the baby, recording all the data he collected on the clone when the little one pried hazy eyes open to look up at the scientist. Its crying pausing, it stared up at Isshin with the oddest eyes Isshin had ever seen in his long career and life. Unlike the rest of the baby's small form, there was no white to his eyes. The irises might have been similar in color to that of his real son's, but surrounded in a sclera of black, the brown they should have been looked more golden; brittle and bright and cold.

Tears and helpless little cries finally quieted as Isshin stared down at the little baby. Its eyes weren't really focused on him, but they were aimed in his direction, like the way a natural born baby will try to focus on a parent rather than a stranger.

Isshin finally smiled, a small, frail expression, and set aside his work. He swaddled the naked baby in a clean, warm towel and held it against him carefully but confidently, remembering what it was like to hold his own baby boy for the first time. Rocking it in a gentle motion, careful to support the clone's head and neck, he watched as those strange eyes seemed to grow heavy. The baby gurgled a few little sounds before falling still and silent again, fast asleep. Still holding it carefully in one strong arm, Isshin reached up to wipe the traces of stray tears away from his scruffy features as he watched the baby sleep.

Isshin was incredibly careful with the baby's growth and development. He did everything in his power to keep it healthy and strong. He took to calling the little one Shiro, because of the baby's distinguishable lack of coloring.

Back in Isshin's hometown, the case had all but come to a standstill. Both Mr. Kurosaki and his son were still on the missing persons database, but the police had mostly stopped searching for them. It was presumed to be a murder suicide. In the quiet of private homes and off record meetings, everyone agreed; the scientist had finally lost it. Who could blame him? After facing such a tragedy, anyone would have crumbled. So most everyone agreed; Isshin had most likely kidnapped his son and ended their suffering in private somewhere, somewhere where he could hold his boy while he did it, somewhere where he could finally find peace and the two of them could join Isshin's wife and daughters, Ichigo's mother and unborn sisters.

Of course, this wasn't really the case. Isshin had indeed snapped and was still crumbling, his sanity a fragile thing whether he realized it or not, but killing his beloved son was out of the question.

He would save Ichigo.

So he continued his work, his comatose son driving his every action. Like the dogs Isshin had cloned and grown, little Shiro grew faster than was normal. By the turn of the year, the little boy appeared closer to toddler age than infancy and was already beginning to learn words.

"Papapapapa." He gurgled quietly as he sat upon the lab table and played with the stethoscope hanging around Isshin's neck.

Isshin smiled, repeating in a slow voice as he tried to teach the young child real words, "Pa pa," He said, drawing out the sounds carefully, "Just twice, Shiro, pa...pa."

"Papa." The baby mimicked and when Isshin's smile grew, so did Shiro's. "Papapapa!"

The scientist chuckled an amused sound, shaking his head slightly as he gently pulled the stethoscope from little hands. "Maybe we should try daddy instead," He mused, lifting the child from the table, "Can you say daddy?"

"Da...dadada." The young clone got stuck on the repeating sound again, an almost confused expression settling over ghostly features.

Isshin chuckled again, "Well that's ok, we'll figure it out, wont we?" He asked as he set the boy down on the floor, making sure he was steady on his feet before letting go.

Little Shiro ignored him and began unsteadily making his way toward the corner of the lab while his creator watched over him. He inevitably found the old stray's bed and toppled forward as he tripped over the blankets. His landing was soft enough though, and he cooed happily as he crawled across the bedding to find the dog.

Isshin went back to his research, knowing the stray would tolerate all the boy's antics as little Shiro pulled on its ears and tail and pet it with less than deft hands. The boy always seemed so fond of the dog, but not the other clone running around. Shiro and the clone of the puppy didn't get along well, though Isshin had yet to figure out why. In fact, like it was with its older, naturally born counterpart, the cloned pup was outright frightening around the baby. Isshin feared he'd have to get rid of it to keep it from hurting the boy while he grew and developed. Luckily, little Shiro seemed just as happy to avoid the unnatural clone and stick with pestering the adult dog.

He wondered if eventually he would see the same aggression in Shiro, but the child had been cloned from his son and Ichigo was tolerant and kind, far from outright aggressive. Then again, the same could be said of the stray, who's genetics the cloned pup had come from. The poor old thing let Isshin pick it up and lay it on the table every few days. It let Isshin conduct his studies and experiments and held still and silent even when needles were pushed under its skin. And it was the same way with Shiro. The dog was patient and even careful with the toddler, letting little Shiro crawl over it and tug on its discolored, borrowed limb.

Soon enough, Isshin was relieved from the need to worry about getting rid of the aggressive puppy. A few weeks later, he was deep in thought and theories when he was startled from his work by a scared and pained wail and a sharp yelp. When young Shiro's cries shattered the silence of his lab, he threw himself away from his table and scrambled around the corner to find the boy smeared in blood with tears streaming down his pale features. He held one arm out in a telling and awkward way as he cried and sniffled and Isshin could see the obvious marks of a bite already beginning to bruise along colorless skin.

He rushed to the boy, scooping him from the ground to further inspect the wound, only to pause and gasp a surprised sound when he finally spotted the cloned pup twitching in a growing pool of its own blood. It breathed in pitiful, wet gasps but still it bared its teeth and tried to growl.

Little Shiro took one look at it and started crying all over again, leaning forward to hide his face against the collar of Isshin's lab coat. "Papapapa-" He hiccuped pitifully through his cries.

Isshin cradled him close, soothing him as he carried him to a table where he could get a better look at the bite. Sharp teeth had broken the skin enough to draw blood and nearly need stitches. He cleaned the wound and bandaged little Shiro up as he pondered over what could have happened. Obviously the clone had bitten the child, but that left him wondering how the clone had ended up choking on its own blood afterward. There was only one conclusion that made sense; little Shiro was beginning to show aggression as well.

After insuring the child would be alright, Isshin decided that it might have been an isolated incident. The cloned dog had attacked, it was entirely possible that the child only became aggressive because of his obvious fear and pain, though a child shouldn't have been able to kill a dog...never mind so destructively and violently.

Even still, Isshin realized that he needed to start distancing himself from getting attached to the child. Shiro had been grown with a very specific purpose in mind, after all. That should have been a hard thing to do though, when the artificially born creation was so young and dependent upon Isshin. But Isshin wasn't the same person he'd always been. Once he had been a kind man and a loving father, but the falling apart of his world had changed that. He grew more withdrawn and bitter by the day.

After his days at work, Isshin retreated to his real son's side. Ichigo was not doing well. Even with the aid of machines, his breathing was beginning to sound wet and shallow, leading Isshin to conclude that his body was beginning to deteriorate at a faster pace. Time was running out and the clone of his son wasn't yet ready to be cut open so that the organs Ichigo needed could be harvested.

Distraught, Isshin began plans for how he could prolong the inevitable. He would need to either speed up Shiro's growth, or slow down Ichigo's deterioration, the dying of his body. After weeks of working on theories and designs, after months of scrapping ideas and going back to the drawing board, Isshin stood staring absently at the colorless copy of his son when he realized what he would have to do to save Ichigo, to keep his boy alive.

It was obvious, really. He set to work building a new growth tank, creating a nutrient rich, stable environment that he would be able to manipulate and alter as the need arose. He built one that would be large enough to fit a full grown man in.

As he worked on it, Shiro became his little helper. The boy was growing out of the toddler stage by the time Isshin's designs were complete. By the time Isshin procured the many materials he would need and construction began, months had passed, nearly another year, and Shiro held the appearance of a nine or ten year old. He eagerly ran back and forth to grab the tools his papa needed as Isshin worked himself into exhaustion on the new, much more complicated and larger tank.

At night, when he finally called it a day, he would retreat to the smaller back room of his lab. He would lock the door behind him and crawl onto his cot to fall asleep at his son's side. He mostly left Shiro to his own devises during the nights, but the front entrance and all the windows of the main house above were securely locked and the artificially cloned boy had nowhere to go.

Sometimes Shiro would venture up the stairs to leave the basement and explore the rest of the house, sometimes he'd stay downstairs where he was more familiar with. In the mornings, Isshin usually found him curled up and sound asleep with the stray, nestled among the blankets and towels that made up the dog's bed and cuddling the poor thing. The dog never seemed to mind his affections. Other times the scientist would find him passed out on a couch or the floor upstairs.

It wanted to pull at his heartstrings that he was letting an innocent little boy live like this, but he refused to let it get to him. Shiro had been created with a specific purpose in mind and like the other cloned creatures, Isshin couldn't get attached to his work. And that's all Shiro was; a scientific creation, grown in a jar so that he could later be killed and used to save another.

It took months for the tank to be fully constructed and in working condition. Young Shiro, despite having the appearance of a boy nearing his early teens, still happily did Isshin's bidding with childish fervor, always happy to help out his papa. In his self-imposed exile and the work he buried himself in, Isshin changed overtime. Even when the scientist purposefully ignored the colorless boy, even began showing neglect and anger towards the pale creation, Shiro didn't seem to notice or mind. He may not have looked it, but he still acted and thought like a child.

When the tank was finally completed, Isshin instructed Shiro on how to help him load it onto a push-dolly. The massive tank was heavy and solid, as its intended use dictated it be. He wheeled the cart containing the tank over to the ever locked back door, and disappeared within, once again leaving Shiro to his own devices.

The clone listened as things were moved around, some sliding across the floor, some crashing to the ground. Inside what had become his son's bedroom, Isshin rearranged to make room for the tank. He pushed shelving aside and wheeled Ichigo's bed out of the way, careful with the cords and wires and tubes that kept his boy living and breathing. When he'd arranged the tank exactly where he wanted it, he carefully pulled the wheeled cart from under it and began filling it with a mixture similar to what he'd grown Shiro and his canine clones in.

In the past, he would have prayed that he'd been accurate in his calculations and theories and that everything would go well. But now, there was none of that. He trusted in his science alone and he knew he was right. He had to be. If he wasn't, his son was going to die and that couldn't happen. He wouldn't let it.

With much careful maneuvering and careful but hard work, Isshin lifted his son from the bed he couldn't leave. Precise in what he was doing, he immersed Ichigo in the tank, still hooked up to the machines that kept him breathing, kept his body functioning and monitored his heart-rate and brainwaves. Orange hair, grown long in his years of stillness, fanned out in the water around his features, nearly glowing in the light of the tank's lid. All the wires connected to Ichigo rose upward and were fed through a small opening in the lid, so that the machines they connected to could be kept free of the liquid within. Ichigo was left suspended in the tank, breathing through a tube, eyes closed and skin pale.

Isshin stared at his son for hours and wept at what had become of his only child. Later that day, he reminded himself that this was only temporary, that Ichigo would not remain this way forever, and dragged himself from the back room of his lab. He went back to doing what he did best, to what kept him sane. Isshin locked the door to his son's room and went back to work.

Shiro was happy to see him and grinned as he jumped up from where he'd been sitting at the stray's side to prance over to his creator. Isshin didn't smile back at him and after a few minutes of trying to get the elder's attention, Shiro's happy expression melted away and he went back to pestering the dog.

From then on, they mostly only interacted when Isshin asked Shiro to help him with something, or when it was time to eat. Once a week, Isshin would call the boy over for testing and blood work. Since Shiro was getting too big to pick up, he'd have the child hop up onto his metal lab table and Shiro would automatically hold out his arm, palm up. So used to the procedure, having gone through it weekly since he'd been 'born', Shiro didn't even squirm as a sanitized needle was pushed under his pale skin and blood was drawn.

He watched with something like fascination as Isshin drew his blood, injected it into a sterilized test tube, and set it in the centrifuge. Then he'd wait patiently for his father figure to tell him he'd done well, preen under the tiny bit of praise, and hop down from the table to continue playing with the dog.

Though he remained mostly quiet and left the scientist alone like Isshin told him to, Shiro was still more observant that Isshin realized. Perhaps his curiosity came from Isshin. After all, Ichigo was of Isshin's blood and Shiro was of Ichigo's very DNA, but whatever it was, he watched his father and creator for most of the day, observed the things Isshin did, all his little habits, all his mannerisms as he worked. He had no contact with other people or with the outside world, only his creator, but it was enough to teach him basic human behavior and he eventually began imitating Isshin's writings.

He'd sneak scraps of paper and a pencil and Isshin would pretend like he didn't notice as Shiro would go sit in a corner and scribble over the paper. He didn't write real letters or words, merely little squiggly lines and imitations, but it was an interesting thing that the scientist in Isshin couldn't help but make note of.

Somewhere along the line, the messy lines became drawings of the things around him and Shiro would sit for hours, copying beakers and lab equipment and even the dog down onto paper. On one of Isshin's necessary trips to the small town, he picked up a sketchbook and some colored pencils with his groceries and needed items. Shiro lit up when he was given his new gift and instantly went about adding color to his drawings as he worked on filling the blank pages.

One day, nearing what should have been Shiro's fourth birthday, he started to draw something from memory rather than what he saw around him. It wasn't perfect and most of the details were a little off, but he drew a picture of the large tank he'd helped Isshin build nearly a year ago now. Proud of himself, and maybe a little confused on what it was that he'd drawn, Shiro climbed to his feet, sketchbook and pencil in hand, and walked over to his father.

Like always, Isshin was hard at work and deep in thought. The boy, much larger than his age would suggest, stood by quietly and watched while he waited for Isshin to address him. After several minutes, notebook held close to his chest, Shiro frowned.

Isshin sat with his head bowed, eyes scanning line after line of numbers and letters and things that Shiro had no idea about. He knew it was papa's work though. Growing frustrated and tired, Isshin sighed and grumbled something to himself, hands wringing upon the edge of the table turned desk.

"Papapa..pa.." The child finally spoke up. A slight frown marred pale features, brows furrowing as Shiro repeated the sound a few too many times and recognized that it sounded odd. "pa..."

"Shiro-!" Isshin started to snap, cutting the repeated word off as he looked over at the boy. He held up two fingers and gave the pallid clone a telling look, jaw tight.

A sheepish, almost guilty expression crossed his features as odd, golden eyes panned downward for a moment. "Pa-" Shiro held up one finger, like Isshin, then a second. "-pa..."

Isshin nodded slightly, a bit of a torn look on his scruffy face as he finally stepped away from his work. He put his pen down, scratched at the week old stubble that lined his jaw, and gave his creation his rare attention. "What is it, Shiro?"

The odd creature crossed his hands in front of himself, the fingers of his right pulling at one finger of his left. He looked up at Isshin with wide, curiosity filled eyes. "What's this, papa?"

The scientist frowned again, watching the child he'd grown. He was growing far more swiftly than a normal person, at least at the moment, but it seemed there were still bugs with his genetics. He had trouble with certain things, especially anything that repeated. Sounds were especially hard for him, Isshin wondered if it was somehow connected to his odd, watery voice, and he'd draw the same thing over and over before moving to something new. And even though his outward age was nearing early teens, his mind still worked much like a child's. Granted, Shiro was barely over a few years old in reality, so even though his developing mind seemed behind his physical years, he was still far ahead of other children his true age.

"Shiro..." He drawled, giving the boy a critical look. "You know what fingers are..."

Pale features twisted into a pout, "No..." He twisted his thumb and pointer finger around the base of one of his fingers on his other hand as he stared at Isshin. "This." He demonstrated, "You do this a lot... Why?"

Frown deepening, Isshin mimicked the child's motions, twisting his fingers around the base of his ring finger as he tried to figure out what the clone meant. His fingertips brushed cool, smooth metal and he looked down. His dark brows furrowed in an almost sad, helpless way as he twisted the ring he never removed, and recognized what motions the creation was trying to copy. He closed his eyes for a moment, before looking back up at the pallid creature.

Sometimes he forgot how observant the boy was, but Shiro had obviously picked up on his habit of fidgeting with the ring while in deep thought.

"It's a ring, Shiro." He said lowly, but not harshly.

"A ring..." Shiro mused, brows arched, eyes directed at the object he'd been talking about as he continued to copy over and over again the motions that he so often witnessed from his creator; the twisting of the man's ring. He crept a small step closer to get a better look. "What for?"

"People have lots of reasons to wear rings," A very small smile twitched onto Isshin's features. He stepped around his lab table, closer to the clone he usually tried to distance himself from, physically and otherwise. He looked down at his ring, still twisting it. "but this one is very important. It was a symbol of the bond I had with my wife."

"Papa was married?" The lad's lilting voice was filled with wonder, "I have a mamama..ma?"

Isshin looked up, arched a brow slightly and held up two fingers. Shiro mimicked him, first holding up one finger, "Ma-" then a second, "-ma."

Isshin nodded his approval, and continued. "I was married...years ago..." He paused, glanced back down at his wedding ring; a simple, golden band. "She wasn't your mother...you don't have a mother...but..." As he thought about it, finally reflected upon something other than his goal, on something other than what consumed his very life, Isshin realized something. "I think, if she were still alive, she would have loved you like her own."

Masaki would have never allowed him to do this. If Masaki were alive, and Ichigo had still been in the accident anyway. If she had been around to see all that Isshin had done, all that he'd been working so hard to do. If she had been alive to see the creature, the clone, the _life_, he'd created in his desperation, she would have never allowed him to follow through with his plans. Even if it was to save their son, Masaki would have taken Shiro in as her own, as a real child. She wouldn't have let him kill the boy.

Part of that hurt Isshin, knowing that he was going against what his beautiful, beloved wife would have wanted...but he had to save Ichigo. He had to save his son, his real child. Ichigo was his only child, the only family he had. Ichigo was all Isshin had left.

He looked up again, glanced at the clone, "She would have been happy to have you call her mama."

A small, happy little smile rested on colorless lips. Shiro looked pleased with the new information and with what his father and creator said. A few seconds later he went back to pestering the dog, petting and doting on the scarred up, tired old animal.

Isshin went back to work, like he always did.

He wasn't granted much peace though, when Shiro remembered the reason he'd originally been bothering his papa. Jumping up and grabbing his notebook, he scurried back over to the lab table and proudly flipped to the drawing, holding it out to show Isshin, "Look, papapa!"

Isshin sighed at the extra syllable, but looked up again. He started to force a smile to indulge the child, when he realized what Shiro was showing him. The door that tank sat behind was always locked, and Shiro was never allowed within. Amazed about the implications of what Shiro had drawn, Isshin took the book being shown to him and further studied the drawing.

"This is very good, Shiro," He praised, much to the clone's pleasure. "Where did you see this?"

The boy frowned a bit and shrugged, "Dunno. I just drew it. D'ya like it? You can have it if ya do, papa."

Shiro had only ever drawn things he'd seen around him, never things from his past. In fact, he'd never really even showed signs of having any real form of long term memory. To the scientist, this was an amazing new development in a life-form he'd created. "I do, thank you, Shiro."

"You can keep it then." Shiro repeated with a smirk.

Isshin couldn't help the small smile that tugged at his scruffy, worn features. With a small sigh, he gave in and nodded, but turned the drawing back to the clone, "You have to sign it then. You can't give people your art if you don't sign it."

"Oh!" Shiro eagerly took the drawing pad back, but paused as he looked at the picture, pencil in hand. The eagerness drained from his features and he looked back up at Isshin, quietly whispering, "How do I do that..?"

"You write your name in the corner," Isshin told him, grabbing the pencil. He knew Shiro didn't know how to read and write, since Isshin had never taught him, so he wrote the letters very lightly in the corner and handed the pencil back, "Like that, trace over top of the letters."

"Ok!" Eager again, Shiro very carefully followed the light lines his father had made for him, "This is my name?"

"Mhmm." Isshin nodded and pointed out the few letters, telling the boy what each one was called and what sound of his name it made. Shiro eagerly drank in the new information, repeating each sound while he traced the letter with his pencil. After he'd figured it out and memorized it, he excitedly scurried away and began signing his name to all his other drawings.

Isshin let his smile slip away and watched for a few minutes, absentmindedly twisting his wedding band, before he again turned back to his work.

In the coming days, the scientist began paying a bit more attention to his young charge. He took note of how curious about everything Shiro was. He took note of how the boy seemed to watch everything; the dog, the computer that ran Isshin's programs and experiment probabilities, the centrifuge when it was on. As those days ticked by into weeks, then into months, he also began to realize that something was off about the boy.

Shiro normally grew so fast that in the past, sometimes only a couple of weeks would mark an obvious change in his height and weight. And his hair grew equally fast, so Isshin had to cut it every few weeks to keep it from growing long and out of control. But as more time passed, Isshin realized that he wasn't seeing much change in the boy anymore. He hadn't cut Shiro's hair in months, yet it wasn't even touching his shoulders yet, and he still only looked to be in his early teens, when he should have been nearing mid-teens by all of Isshin's calculations.

All the while, his curiosity grew. He began learning things easier, speaking easier. He started conversations more and on more than a few occasions, Isshin would catch him talking to the dog when Isshin himself was busy. His drawings became more elaborate, more detailed and he started drawing things aside from what he was surrounded with. He started drawing things he shouldn't have had much knowledge of at all, things he'd seen through the windows of the house he was locked in, things he'd seen when he was only very small still. He even drew the cloned pup he'd killed as a baby.

It was like something in the child was trying to play catch up. Shiro's physical growth had begun to slow down and level off to something more normal, while his mental development had seemed to speed up. It was an anomaly Isshin could have never predicted. The other two dogs he'd cloned had both been killed off before they'd reached this stage, and his work was unprecedented, leaving Isshin with no former examples to base his theories and research upon. At first, it was exciting. It was amazing and new and incredible.

But only at first.

It quickly wore off as Isshin realized what would come of the new development. If Shiro's growth was slowing down, he'd never catch up to Ichigo in age... The older man had been waiting so that the clone could develop into a full adult, so that his body would be as close to Ichigo's as was possible before he preformed the necessary procedures. Granted, Isshin knew enough about the medical field to know that donors were rarely the same age as the recipients. In fact, race, gender or age actually had very little to do with it. More important was blood type and Shiro's blood type was an exact match to Ichigo's. In fact, his blood was Ichigo's. But Isshin had been airing on the side of caution, insuring the clone's body, organs included, were fully developed and functioning before giving them to his son.

Now that Shiro had stopped physically growing so quickly, there was no longer any need to wait. Though the tank and the conditions within had surely prolonged his life, Isshin's son was still running out of time. In the back of his mind, the scientist knew that even should this work, even should Ichigo wake up from his coma after he was given new, functioning organs and blood and everything else that needed replaced by now, the chances of Ichigo ever being Ichigo again were very slim. Brain damage alone all but insured Ichigo would never have a quality life again, never get into college, never finish his senior year in high school, never be well enough to be out of Isshin's care and on his own, but Isshin couldn't accept that. He was a father. Ichigo was his son, his _child_. He had to try.

It took him days to mentally sort through what he'd have to do. He had to put Shiro under. He had enough sedative that he'd be able to essentially kill the boy. Shiro's heart would stop while he slept, brain activity would follow shortly after, and Isshin would only need to keep his basic bodily functions active long enough to complete the transplants. The clone wouldn't feel a thing.

So, on the day Isshin normally would have drawn blood for more testing, the man forced his voice to stay even and level, and called the boy he'd created over. After years of watching over Shiro, of creating him and raising him and watching him develop and learn, Isshin was going to kill him.

Like he did every week, Shiro stopped drawing and smiled as he hurried over to his father's side. He hopped up onto the metal lab table and held out his arm, palm up. Isshin turned a weak smile on him and grabbed the syringe. As he watched, a small frown creased Shiro's ashen brows, golden eyes settling on the needle.

"Papapapa...why 's there already somefin' in it?" He asked, picking up on the oddity of the situation. He'd gone through this routine enough to know that the syringe was usually empty until his father filled it with his blood. "There wont be 'ny room in it for the blood..."

"It's ok, Shiro." Isshin practically whispered, pushing the plunger to the syringe a bit, until a tiny drop of the sedative beaded at the tip. "It wont hurt..." When he was sure it was in working order and there wouldn't be a problem, he gently took the boy's arm, pressing his thumb just below the crook of Shiro's elbow where a prominent, blue vain stood out against pale skin.

Confused, knowing something wasn't right, Shiro whimpered a small, frightened sound as the sharp needle was pushed through his skin. He furrowed his brows, the bridge of his nose crinkling as he watched. "I don't wanna..." He protested quietly, but as Isshin started to push on the plunger again and the slight burn of the foreign liquid entered his veins, he gasped a sharp sound, eyes going wide. "Papa! Nooo..."

He jerked his arm away, not liking the odd feeling. Isshin cringed, refused to look the boy in the eye, and held his arm. "It's alright, Shiro... It'll be over soon..." Isshin soothed quietly.

Tears started to form in the corners of inverted eyes as Shiro's bottom lip trembled. He struggled against the older man, becoming more fervent and insistent as his fear grew. Almost half the dose had been injected when he finally started really crying. Tears streaked his features and he shook his head, terrified and confused.

"Papapapa-" He chanted over and over again, shaking as the room seemed to blur and swim before his eyes. As the sedative began taking effect, and Shiro began to slump forward, leaning his weight against his father, something snapped. It was just like with the pup, and as he sobbed terrified tears against his creator, he bared his teeth and started pushing Isshin away again.

"No, Shiro, n-no..." Isshin tried to sooth as the boy continued to struggle. He'd very nearly injected the full dose but he wanted to be sure it worked, so he continued to fight with the child. "Shhhh...it's alright, Shiro, you're being such a good boy..." He praised, knowing how much the clone usually enjoyed it.

That wasn't the case this time, as Shiro's cries grew louder, until he was nearly screaming, tears streaking pale features to drip from his chin. Though he still thought and mostly acted like a child, he had the size of a teenage boy. He wasn't small and fragile, not like he'd been against the puppy.

Isshin grunted under the force of the boy's next shove. He looked up just in time to see terror stricken features twist with an instinctive sort of aggression. Like the cloned puppy had against the stray, Shiro turned on his creator. It was basic instinct, self preservation. Shiro knew something wasn't right, he knew his papa was not protecting him, and he fought back.

He all but threw his father away from himself, overturning the table he'd been sitting on in the process. The metal table hit the ground with a deafening clang, bouncing before sliding to a halt. Everything that had been sitting across it, the tools Isshin had gotten out in preparation for what he'd need to do after sedating his creation, scattered across the ground, some shattering.

Frightened beyond words, Shiro ripped the needle from his arm and flung it across the room. It shattered when it hit the wall near where the stray dog cowered in a corner. The pale clone bared teeth down at his father as Isshin groaned, reaching up to press the heel of his hand against his throbbing head, and started to rise.

His steps wavering under the drugs, Shiro advanced on the man trying to hurt him, eyes wide and teeth bared in a horrid mix of confusion, fear, pain and aggression. Tears streaked his features as his name fell from his father's lips. He cried out to his papa as Isshin screamed.

By the time Isshin fell still, Shiro was covered in blood, slipping in slick, warm puddles as he struggled through numbing sedatives. He couldn't understand what had happened, what he'd done, and he finally gave up, falling to his butt and calling out for his papa as his hands fisted in Isshin's lab coat. A few moments later, he fell still, breathing in pitifully weak little gasps as adrenaline wore off and his system was flooded with too much sedative. Gold on black eyes rolled back as Shiro collapsed.

He laid there, in a puddle of his dead father's blood, for hours. When he finally started to come to again, his body forcefully rejected the substances it had been fed, and he added everything he'd eaten in the past day to the floor until he passed out again.

It was nearly two days before he actually regained full consciousness and when he did, Shiro whimpered at the pounding in his head, the pain in his everything, and the nauseating smell around him. Disoriented, the boy clutched at his aching stomach with one hand as he pushed himself into a sitting position with the other. He looked around, confused and still groggy, mind sluggish, but when he spotted Isshin's body sitting hardly a foot away, his eyes went wide and he crawled the short distance.

"Pa...papapa..." He trembled as he tugged at Isshin's lab coat with red stained hands, "No, papa...I'm sorry..."

Of course, he got no response. The stray dog painfully climbed from its bed in the corner and slinked its way over to Shiro, cowering as low to the ground as it could get as it walked, tail tucked between its legs.

When it nosed at Shiro's arm, the boy turned toward it with tears in his eyes and pulled the dog close. He buried his face in its mangy fur, sniffling as he sat on the floor and trembled. It took him a few hours, but eventually the boy weakly pulled himself to his feet. He stumbled over to the nearest wall of the lab, where he paused to lean his weight. After two days of laying on a cold, concrete floor, nearly overdosing and without food or water, the movement made him dizzy and stole what was left of his strength. The dog loyally trailed at his side, a limp in its steps as it used its foreign leg and what was left of its tail tried to waggle.

After a few moments, the clone pushed on. He grabbed his notebook and pencils on his way by, and made his way to the staircase that led up into the rest of the house. The first thing he did was begin digging through cupboards for something to fill his belly with. After eating until his stomach quit protesting, he fell asleep on the couch, fingers tangled in what was left of the dog's scruffy fur.

Days came and went. Shiro mostly paced up and down the stairs, constantly trying to wake his father up each time he entered the basement. The dried blood on his pale skin itched and after scratching until he bled, he finally figured out how to work the shower upstairs and bathed himself, without help from his creator, for the first time. The water ran nearly black, thick with dried fluids and grime, as it swirled down the drain.

When he'd dried off, he went back down to the lab and dug around for some of his clothing. He dressed himself and sat down on the opposite side of the large space from Isshin's body, and began to draw. And draw. And draw.

He drew whatever came to mind, which was mostly his papa. He drew Isshin at work in his lab. He drew Isshin drawing blood from him, drew him scribbling in his notebooks and staring at his computer and twist-twisting his ring. Then he drew Isshin laying on the ground and he used his red colored pencil for that one.

When he was done with each drawing, he carefully signed his name in the corner before flipping to the next page. Eventually, he grew hungry again, so he closed his notebook and climbed back up the stairs to find more food. The stray dog whined a small sound and stared up at him as he nibbled and he looked down at the animal, before tearing the piece of bread in half and handing over part of it. The hungry animal scarfed it down and Shiro smiled, giving it the rest of his half.

A week went by. He ran out of things he could eat. The body in the basement had long since begun to smell and it was becoming unbearable, even upstairs. Still, it took Shiro a few days of going hungry before he grew desperate enough to try to find a way out of the house.

He'd never left before, never ventured beyond the small house. Because of Shiro's appearance and obvious oddities, as well as the nature of his creation and what he'd been intended for, Isshin had never dared bring him on any of the rare trips he'd made to the small town nearly an hour's drive away. He always locked the pale boy in, made sure Shiro was securely hidden away. Shiro only ever saw the outside world through the windows and in a few of the various books Isshin had laying around.

But desperation and instinct were powerful things, as was the drive for survival. He tired the door at least a half dozen times before finally giving in and realizing he wasn't going to be able to get through whatever lock Isshin had put on it. It needed a key even from the inside.

So Shiro turned to one of the windows. Afraid he'd get in trouble, he hesitated to break it, but eventually worked up the courage to find something heavy down in papa's lab. He threw a heavy, metal tray through the glass, ducking as it shattered. The sound scared the dog and the stray yelped a dry sound and cowered.

Shiro looked over at it, then back to the window. After a moment of debate, he dragged the couch over to sit under the broken window and climbed onto the cushions, then onto the window's sill. It wasn't a far drop to the ground, only a few feet, but when he landed, broken glass crunched under foot and he grit his teeth, features twisting.

But he still had to get his dog through, so he turned back to the gaping window and stuck his arms back through, "C'mon, pupuppy..." He called, watching as the stray's ears perked at his voice. "C'mere...aren't ya hungry too? We can go find somethin' ta eat..."

It was more his voice then his words that brought the dog over to the couch, but Shiro decided the animal must have been as hungry as him. He patted the back of the couch through the window and the mutt tentatively climbed up onto the couch as he bid.

"Good doggy." Shiro praised quietly as he reached through and wrapped his arms around the scared up, skinny thing. He grunted as he lifted it and pulled it through the gaping window, bottom lip trembling as he shifted on the broken glass below his feet. But he refused to set the dog down on it too, so he walked a few feet through damp grass, until he was clear of the jagged shards, before he set the animal down and dropped to the ground himself.

The dog let out a low whine as it laid down beside him in the grass and Shiro patted it before pulling one of his feet toward him. He chewed his bottom lip as he pulled the broken glass free, pained tears trying to blur his vision.

When he'd removed the glass from the bottoms of his feet, he finally sighed and looked around himself. He'd seen most of this from inside, through the windows, but it was still new, still foreign. He knew no fear, however, only wonder and curiosity, and he pulled himself to his feet with a bit of effort.

As he started walking, choosing a random direction, the dog groaned a tired, worn out sound and struggled to its feet again. It loyally limped along behind him for hours, head hanging low and panting as the sun rose above the canopy of trees the woods created.

Sketchpad in hand and followed by the only real friend he'd had in his short life, Shiro padded through what he'd only ever been allowed to look at before. He forgot about being hungry, tired. He forgot about his dead father and the lab he'd left behind. He touched and inspected and smelled everything around him; the patchy grass below foot, the bark of the tree trunks around him, leaves and flowers and even the half chewed, dead squirrel he came across.

Trailing behind him, the dog seemed less impressed. It's steps were tired and short, dragging. It's scared up features were slack and it's brown eyes were dull from years of misguided abuse. It did manage to peel its lips back and bare teeth as they trudged past what Shiro hadn't recognized as something else's meal, but that was the extent of the stray's energy.

After wandering in a meandering trail for the majority of the day, Shiro's fatigue eventually caught up to him. With a sigh and a small frown, he sat down against the base of a tree and looked around. Completely lost, it didn't even occur to him to go back to the house he'd been created in now that it was getting dark. He'd left it behind for a reason, after all.

It took the dog a few minutes to catch up to him, and when it did, the stray lowered itself to the ground at the boy's side with a weak grunt. It stretched out, flattened on its side, and settled its head in Shiro's lap. The two fell asleep as the colorless clone ran long fingers over coarse fur.

In the morning, Shiro yawned as he awakened, his stomach making a painful, unhappy sound that reminded him he hadn't eaten in days. The dog's head was still in his lap, below his hands and a small smile twitched to life on pale lips. "C'mon pupu..." He skewed up his features and very carefully enunciated the word, "puppy... Let's find somethin' ta eat."

But the dog didn't respond to his voice like it usually did. No tired stretching as it stood, no happy little grumble as he petted it. Not even a worn out, annoyed huff of hot breath against his hand.

Shiro frowned, swallowed hard, and ran his hands through course, dry fur. He shook the animal a bit as he looked down at the heavy head in his lap. His only friend, the only consistent playmate he had, lay dead against him.

He frowned all the harder, pressed the heel of one hand against his eye as he settled the dead dog's head down across the animal's paws and pulled himself to his feet. Shiro left the stray where it had died and with a final pet and a small, sad little sniff, continued on his aimless journey. He wandered, barefooted and lost, through the woods for nearly the rest of that day too, before he finally came to something that wasn't the same as everything else around him.

At first, a little delirious and on the verge of collapse, he thought maybe he'd somehow ended up back at the little house he'd been grown in, but he quickly realized the wooden boards ran the wrong way, up and down instead of horizontally like siding. Through his worn haze, a spark of curiosity made Shiro wander up to the structure. He ran his hand over the smooth, treated wood. It still had a little bit of a chemical smell to it from the lacquer, like it was fresh. But that wasn't quite what registered to Shiro. What he picked up from the foreign smell was that it was more familiar to him from his time locked away in a scientist's lab than was the earthy, natural smells he'd been surrounded by for days now.

As it turned out, the boy was pretty good at climbing, even if it was an eight foot tall privacy fence meant specifically to keep people out. He jumped up, hands catching the top edge, and hoisted himself over with a grunt. His landing was a little less than graceful, but considering the poor state he was in from wandering round through the woods for days -even longer still since he'd last eaten or truly rested- that he stayed upright at all was a small feat.

Something not far off growled an odd sound, before it hissed and scurried away.

Shiro half jolted at the unexpected sound, before straightening and trying to follow the little animal. It disappeared in a thick patch of greens and reds and yellows and the clone realized he couldn't follow it through, too big to climb between the plants and the posts they grew along.

Attention sufficiently directed at the new plants instead of the small animal, he curiously inspected them, before finding a bright red, round something growing close by. When he reached out to feel the smooth, almost waxy looking texture, the vegetable pulled free and fell to the dirt with a dull thump.

Brows arching a bit, Shiro stooped in a crouch to settle on his haunches, before reaching out and picking the tomato up. As odd as it may have seemed, having only been alive for a handful of years and hidden away for all of them, he'd never actually seen a whole tomato before. But as the pressing issue that was his very unhappy belly persisted, it didn't take him long to realize it was a vegetable and therefore edible.

Biting into it, he was too busy focusing on how very _hungry_ he was to realize the juice from the tomato dripped down his chin. It took him hardly a few seconds to consume the vegetable, and he quickly started to check the others. The first had fallen off with his touch, so he merely poked at a few, before another bright red one fell free under his touch.

Crouched down and so hidden from sight, he missed as the cat he'd been originally following hopped up onto the back porch of the small home that the yard enclosed and rubbed against a sliding glass door. Behind the glass, the owner of the house and property deep in the woods frowned slightly as bright blue eyes panned over his backyard, before dropping to glance at the upset feline.

It was probably just a raccoon or opossum upsetting the barn cat. Thinking nothing of it, the man grunted a small sound and, after finding nothing of interest, turned back to the interior of his home to continue his morning routine.

Later that afternoon, hours later after the incident, the man wandered outside. As an afterthought, he decided to take a peek around his garden, hoping the pests didn't do any real damage.

They rarely did though, not since putting up the fence and getting a cat. His little feline hunter took care of mice and birds and the smaller annoyances that could wreak havoc on his plants, and since putting up the fence, the deer had quit depleting his crop.

It was quite the shock when he wandered through his rather large garden, passed the peppers and cucumbers and squash, towards the back, and found that not only were most of the tomatoes that had been just about ripe yesterday gone, but that what was left of them lay scattered in a messy pile at the base of one of his plants.

After months of constant issues, he'd finally given in and put a privacy fence around his private property, in the middle of the woods where he had no neighbors and privacy wasn't a thing he needed to concern himself with, and now he was having issues again. It was like nature and all her creatures had decided to play some horrible game with him this year.

"You've got to be shitting me." The big man grumbled lowly.

Not far off, the big orange barn cat disappeared between two rows of vegetables as it stalked for prey. The man snorted. Next time the little hunter came running to the backdoor, he'd be more concerned. For now, he was left the task of trying to figure out how to save his season's worth of fresh produce.

But how did someone challenge nature at her own game?

"Barbwire..."

An hour and half later, Grimmjow and a store clerk had donned thick, leather work gloves and were busy loading rolls of barbwire into the back of an old, black pickup truck. The inside of the bed was scratched and gouged and mud splattered its sides and grill, making obvious its duty as a work truck. After another half hour of drive time back to his home in the middle of nowhere, Grimmjow wasted little time in getting to work. Mounting the fixtures that would hold the barbed wiring along the top of the fence took him most of the day.

After hours of hard work in hot, midsummer weather, he called it a day and decided he'd finish the wiring part later, the next day perhaps. Wiping sweat from his brow with the back of one tanned hand, he dropped his tools to on a sturdy, wooden patio table that sat out back behind his house, kicked off his work boots, and retired inside for a cool shower and something to eat as the sun started to set.

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**Expect the second and final part soon, it's already written and merely needs edited. (which will hopefully be done better than this chapter was... OTL) Anyway, I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the story thus far!  
Thank you for giving it a chance~**


	2. Chapter 2

**The second and final chapter. As promised, it's a bit on the happier side than the first half.  
**

**Enjoy~**

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Seated upon the cool dirt and grass just on the other side of the tall fence where he would have been easily found had the owner of the property thought to check along the outside perimeter, Shiro leaned his back against the warm wood. Still worn out from his trying past several days, he'd climbed back over the fence, curled against it, and fallen asleep with a much less upset stomach than before. He slept through nearly the entire day, his body unaccustomed to so much exercise and wandering since he'd previously been cooped up in a small house and its basement.

When he was finally roused from his sleep, the sun was setting and the din of diurnal animals was only a low, whispered hush. He stretched his arms above his head, groaning a small sound as he woke up. Relaxing back against the fence, he rubbed the sleep from one eye as he looked around.

Now that he'd accomplished his original goal of finding something to eat so he didn't starve, he was left with wondering what he was supposed to do. The only other human he'd ever had contact with, his father and creator, was dead. The abused stray he'd inadvertently come to see as his only friend was dead. He was alone, in the middle of the woods, in land he'd lived in all his short life but had never been able to explore, and he was lost as to what he was supposed to do.

All around him, as light was snuffed out and the dark began to settle in, things began to stir once more. Nocturnal creatures hooted in the branches above and rustled through the grasses. A set of silver, glowing eyes turned his way, before flashing off with the quiet sound of little feet. As the very last rays of evening sun dipped below the horizon and the shadows engulfed all else, Shiro let out a tiny, unsure sound.

Suddenly, leaving the spot he'd curled up in seemed like a daunting task.

So instead, since he had no real destination in mind, he slowly stood, still peering about almost nervously, and turned back to the fence. With a quick hop, he caught the top edge and began pulling himself over. There were metal fixtures every few feet that he didn't remember before, but it wasn't something he dwelt on as he crested the edge and dropped to the other side in a crouch.

Being outside, in the open with no walls and no ceiling was a foreign thing to him. Once inside the fence's perimeter, the towering wooden barrier brought him the comfort of familiarity and helped to ease his wariness. Once there, the first thing he did was wander towards the middle of the yard, exploring the garden and the various plants and fixtures within.

Like earlier that day, something small flashed through the rows of plants, low to the ground and swift. Shiro's attention was instantly drawn to it, and he began searching for the cat. He followed it through the middle of the neatly planted garden, watched it slide from his view as it cut from one row to the next over. He weaved around the plants behind it, trying to call it to him the way he used to with his dog.

Of course the feline didn't listen and kept evading him. When Shiro finally did catch it, grabbing hold of its back half as it tried to slip through his grasp, it turned on him, hissing and spitting. Sharp claws found his hand as the cat's maw scrunched in aggression and warning, its ears falling back and tail poofing out.

When little, hooked claws tore through his skin with enough tenacity to draw little lines of bright red, Shiro gasped a sharp sound, ashen brows furrowing. He didn't let go though, and so the cat kept fighting too.

The more the animal struggled, the more it tore into him and drew blood, the more Shiro's instinctive, aggressive side began to resurface. Just like with the scientist and the puppy before him, as pain flared through the boy's spine, it lit a fire in his mind.

Soon enough, not only was the small animal hissing and growling, but it was yowling in an awful, wailing way as it twisted and writhed, trying to get away. The loud, obviously distressed sounds drew attention and a light that had previously been dark illuminated the room that the back porch of the house led into.

Shiro froze, eyes going wide as his head snapped up to look. As if only just realizing he'd been hurting the small animal, he dropped it and jerked his hands up, close to his chest. Limping and terrified, but alive, the cat quickly fled, jumping up onto the porch and hiding against the glass, sliding door that led inside.

From inside, the home owner jolted from his comfortable, lazy seat upon the couch as the first terrified screech pierced the air. It couldn't have been anything other than his cat, so he knew that whatever was the cause, was most likely in his backyard. Maybe it was the same thing that had been tearing up his garden earlier that day and frightened the cat before.

Grabbing his shotgun from where it sat in the corner behind the door, he shoved a couple shells into the chamber, and yanked the sliding door open. He stepped over the cat he normally kept outside as it ran inside, seeking a safe place to hide. Cocking the gun, the man slid the door shut behind him and stepped barefoot and shirtless, dressed in only a pair of sweatpants, onto his back patio.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as the door had opened, everything had fallen silent. With surprisingly graceful, quiet steps as he searched the dark, he crept out into his yard, toward the extensive patch of tall, thick growing plants that made up his large garden. A small sound from off to his right had him jerking the barrel of the gun in that direction, raised and level, ready to fire.

He just barely caught rustling through his plants and, unworried but cautious just in case, he adjusted his course again as he slipped between rows of healthy vegetables. All fell silent again as he crept towards the back edge of the garden. When he reached it, he found nothing, and scanned the mostly flat yard of green grass between the garden and back edge of his fence for a few moments.

Then, just as he was getting ready to turn back toward the garden to find whatever was hiding within, whatever creature had been eating his plants and tormenting his cat, he caught movement from his peripheral. He snapped around, gun swinging toward the wraith of something pale and swift, just in time to see it disappear over the top edge of his fence. He just barely caught the dull thump of feet landing in the dirt beyond, and the quick patter of hurried steps that proved whatever it was had fled the moment it had hit the ground.

Sneering, the man debated going around to the yard exit and going after the thing, but the exit was on the opposite side as the direction the trespassing creature had fled and by the time he could get through and make it around the fenced in section, no doubt it would be long gone. Growling a displeased sound, the big man flipped the safety of his shotgun back in place and let the barrel drop with a frustrated motion. With one last look to the top edge of his fence, where the creature had leapt over at, he frowned and headed back towards his porch entrance.

He couldn't think of an animal that could so easily leap an eight foot fence. A deer maybe, if it'd had a running start, but he would have seen that before it had made it over. Besides, a deer wouldn't have attacked his cat. A raccoon or opossum could get over it, obviously, but the blurred glimpse he'd caught had told him it was much too large to be one of the smaller animals that would be able to scale the fence. Used to living so far from civilization, surrounded by wooded land and little else, it never occurred to him that it could have been a person. Never mind that it would have been a nearly impossible feat for a normal person to get over such an obstacle so quickly.

Scowl deepening as he pondered over what it could have possibly been, the man's bright blue eyes flashed with the lighting that seeped out from through the glass doors as he turned his gaze back toward his home. Once inside, he went about finding his frightened little hunter to make sure she wasn't seriously injured or bleeding all over his home.

After finding the cat, he decided to let her sleep inside for the rest of the night, not quite admitting to himself he'd miss the little animal if whatever was stalking his property scared her off or killed her. "We'll finish that barbwire in the morning." He told the barn cat as he put out a bowl of water for her to drink out of for the night.

After a short, but decent night's worth of sleep, that's exactly what he did. Getting up with the rise of the sun, the big man went to work. In a pair of earth-stained but sturdy jeans and a cut-off shirt that had long been faded by the sun, he pulled on his thick leather work gloves and hauled the bundles of sharp wire from the bed of his truck where he'd left it the day before, out into the back yard.

After hours of hard work and plenty of frustration later, he had ringed the top edge of his fence with tight spirals of shining barbwire affixed to the metal facets he'd installed the day before. Stepping back, he looked over his handy work, then down at the cat that had limped out of the house to supervise his every move like cats tended to do. With a nod to the animal, he grinned, "Let's see 'em get over that."

The cat blinked up at him, meowed a long, low sound, and flicked its tail as it stood and walked away with classic feline apathy. The man snorted an amused sound and tugged his gloves off as he headed inside for something to drink.

He wouldn't hear from his pest for that entire day, nor the next, and he assumed the extra barbwire must have done its job in deterring the unwanted creature. It didn't last however, and his assumptions were proven false the night of the second peaceful day.

Being a relatively healthy, if not very strange, growing young man, Shiro couldn't really go all that long without food. Like normal people, every few hours his stomach started to protest over the lack of sustenance filling it. It made him feel sick, it made him tired and unwell and clasped his hands over his flat belly as he wandered aimlessly, hopelessly lost and with nowhere to go.

Had he been as mentally developed as most kids his apparent age, he would have simply walked up to the front door of the house he'd found and asked for help, but he wasn't. He may have looked to be in his mid teens, but he was only a handful of years old, with the developing mind of an age somewhere between the two numbers.

Aside from his father figure, he'd never interacted with another person before, had never actually even seen another person. Couple his inexperience with the home owner's obvious aggression and the fact that Shiro knew he wasn't supposed to be out of his own house, where his papa had always locked him in, the unnatural boy really had no idea what he was supposed to do.

But he could only go so long without food before he was driven to extremes again. After a couple days of his belly feeling hollow and ill, he returned to the only source of food he'd found out in the middle of nowhere. Standing at the base of the tall fence, he looked up at the way the new, metal coil of wire shone under the moon's light. It really didn't look all that imposing, just new.

Holding his sketchbook, the cover smeared with dirty handprints and the corners bent up, he stuck the edge between his teeth so that he could free up his hands and lowered himself closer to the ground. With a quick, easy snap of motion, he jumped up and caught the top edge of the fence. His fingers slid below where the barbwire rested, and he let go with one long enough to pull the notebook from between his teeth and carefully slide it below as well, letting it drop over the edge to land on the other side with a dull thump and a fluttering of paper.

Catching hold of the edge with his second hand again, he carefully began pulling himself higher up. His arms trembled slightly with the effort and control it took as he paused and held himself there, studying the wiring and the sharp little protrusions that decorated it's length.

It didn't take him long at all to figure out that he didn't want to get caught up in that, so rather than simply pulling himself over the fence and dropping to the other side in one quick motion like he had before, he pushed himself as high as he could, baring his teeth as the barbs brushed and scratched at the skin of his arms, and planted his feet along the top of the fence. His pants were thick enough that the barbs didn't push right through the material and even though they caught at his clothing, it was better than catching at his skin.

Once steady enough, essentially balancing on the top row of the fence in a way that very few people would have been able to do, he carefully hopped out and away from the wiring, so that his drop was clear. He landed in a low crouch several feet from the base of the fence, where he froze for a few moments, looking around and listening. When nothing changed and no lights were turned on, he moved to grab his notebook again, and straightened as he took his time in wandering the yard.

Hungry and tired, he of course made his way to the garden again, where he'd found something he could satisfy his painfully hollow belly before. He quickly found that peppers were not on his list of things he considered to be edible, and made a face as he moved to a different section of the garden to find something else.

On that second quiet night, Grimmjow was just contemplating turning in for the evening when his cat, still allowed to sleep indoors for now -not because he had a soft spot for the still limping little creature, oh no- jumped up into the window ledge of his back-facing kitchen. He didn't think much of it at first, until he'd realized the cat had been staring out into the backyard for at least fifteen minutes now, unmoving and in that telling way cats did as they stalked things. Curious, he stepped up behind the cat and parted the curtains a bit to take a look for himself.

At first, he found nothing, just the quiet, peaceful shadows of night. But as his eyes panned over the yard one last time, he caught movement as something startlingly pale in the dark moved between dense rows of vegetation. Recognizing the lack of color as being the same creature he'd scared from his property a few days ago, the big man's features twisted aggressively.

Without shedding light on his yard like he had previously, he quickly made his way to the backdoor, grabbing his gun on the way by, and quietly eased the door open. Sick of all his efforts being for naught, he planned to end the animal that had kept getting into his fresh produce.

Having little contact with people and only minimal experience, Shiro very much reacted in a very base way. He missed the quiet slide of the glass door opening as he curiously poked around and explored while he munched on something green but not leafy. He didn't miss the strange, almost metallic clang as something solid slid, caught, then released, all in calm, controlled intervals that showed they were being controlled and not natural.

He didn't have much life experience, but living in his papa's lab for all of his few years, he knew when something was mechanic, when something was being operated by human hands. And so, even though he didn't realize it was the loading of a gun he'd heard, he knew there must have been someone else around him.

Startled, a little panicky even, he dropped what he'd been munching on and ducked around the next row of thick plants. His eyes were wide and his motions were surprisingly quiet as he tried to keep from being caught, holding his breath as he waited for an opportunity to scurry from the yard. If somebody found him, papa would get angry at him...

Shotgun held at the ready, Grimmjow crept around the back edge of his garden, watching and listening for movement. He stepped on something flat and giving, yet solid and smooth, and looked down as he lifted his foot. Frowning all the deeper, he started to bend to pick up the notebook, when a sudden flash of colorless motion caught his attention from the corner of his eyes.

"Got ya." He muttered as he swung the barrel of his gun in that direction, only for his crystallin blue eyes to go wide and surprise to register across his features. It was certainly no animal that stared back at him as it backed away. "Hey! Hold it!"

The young man turned to flee as Grimmjow called for him to stop. When the punk didn't listen, the older man's features went back to angry as he followed. Astonished, Grimmjow watched as the kid jumped and managed to catch the top edge of the high fence. He again called a demand for the kid to freeze, but was again ignored.

So he fired. Barrel held vertically, the warning shot shattered the silence as the bullet sailed harmlessly through the air.

The unbearably loud, unexpected sound made Shiro yelp and jerk away. Having half pulled himself up onto the fence's top edge, the sudden startlement made his hands slip and tipped his balance. He yelped another startled sound as he lost his hold upon the fence's edged and tumbled forward. The eight foot drop was quickly the least of his worries as the tightly coiled barbwire at the top caught at his clothing as he went over and followed him down.

He hit the ground on the outside of the yard with a thud that pushed the air from his lungs and it took him a moment of stunned silence to catch up to what had happened. But after that moment, he made to scramble away only to find himself tangled in sharp, constricting wiring. He whimpered as the barbs tore at his already ragged clothing and bit into his flesh. When he finally managed to get to his feet, the stiff, cruel wire tripped him up and he crashed to the ground again, unforgiving barbs forced deeper. The more he struggled to free himself and flee, the more hopelessly he became tangled until he was bleeding and in pain and frightened tears were beginning to well in strange eyes.

Grimmjow was surprised, to say the least, when he watched the kid make it to the top of his fence, only to topple over. It took him half a second to really respond as he heard the harsh landing on the other side and saw that he'd have to redo the damned deterrent across the top, but the extra work was forgotten when he heard the rattle of stiff wiring and the distressed whimpers of a child, rather than the cursing or yelling of a young adult.

"Shit-!" He hissed, dropping the notebook he'd grabbed from the ground without second thought. In a rush, he scrambled around to the garden and closer to the house, where he threw the latch to the gate that lead out of his backyard and into the surrounding woods. The gate was left to swing gently on noiseless hinges as he sprinted the length of the fence and around toward the back.

He slid to a halt as he rounded the corner, taking in the sight presented to him. Acting on impulse and instinct, he practically dove to the kid's side, trying desperately to get the pale young man to hold still and quit struggling. For all his efforts, Grimmjow was ignored and the lad's cries only grew louder as blood dripped in thin, vibrant threads from torn flesh.

Realizing the boy wasn't going to listen to him, too frightened and panicking, Grimmjow did the first thing that came to mind. He took up his gun and, his motions quick and his strength careful, knocked the kid out cold. The boy fell still in a tangle of long limbs and cruel wiring and Grimmjow grimaced, a breath hissing between his teeth as he tried to figure out how to proceed. He couldn't just leave him tangled in the mess he'd brought upon himself, so he began carefully pulling at the barbed wire, trying to figure out how best to unwind it and pull the barbs free from pale flesh.

It quickly became evident that he wouldn't be able to just untangle the kid by hand, so he straightened and quickly sprinted back around his fence, through the gate, and to the garage he kept all his tools in. Returning with thick, leather gloves and heavy-duty wire cutters, he settled on his knees and began the painstaking task of cutting the teen free.

As he did, he took in the appearance of the person he'd thought was an animal, a pest, getting into his garden all this time. The kid couldn't have been any older then fourteen, fifteen at the most. He was just a teenager, a boy still. In the pale moonlight, his pallor looked sickly and sallow, as did his long, tangled hair. And he was covered in general filth and dirt, like he'd been wandering outside for days.

Grimmjow shook his head as he finally cut the last of the tangled wire away, freeing the unconscious teen. He stared down at him for a moment, debating what to do and wondering just what the hell he'd been dragged into. Kids this age didn't just get lost in the woods a half hour from the nearest town and other homes. Something very odd was happening.

With a sigh, he pulled the young man from the ground, grunting as he straightened, and carried him inside where he could begin looking over all the small cuts and scrapes from the wire.

It would take Shiro nearly an hour to come around, partially due to the unnatural nature of how he'd fallen unconscious and partially because he'd simply been exhausted for too many days in a row. His body had seen the opportunity for rest, so it had taken it. In that time, Grimmjow was given the chance to realize that it hadn't just been the whitewash effect of the mood's light that made the boy look so pale. Below the dirt and now blood, he really was as colorless as he looked. He did what he could to patch the kid up, then went about making something hot for him to eat whenever he finally woke up, leaving him to lay on the couch in the next room over.

A quiet, groggy sound was his warning as the teen in his house started to awaken. The microwave was a low, distant hum in the background as he moved into the sitting area, leaning against the doorframe with crossed arms as he watched for the boy's reactions.

The first thing to register to Shiro's senses was the smell of something cooking. His stomach gave a loud, painful rumble and he frowned as he groaned and started to roll over. He quickly found out he was absolutely not on the ground anymore and as he tried to roll over so he could push himself up, he rolled right over the side of the couch he'd been laid on. The short drop did nothing more then really wake him up though, and the moment he caught movement out of the corner of his eye, he jerked back and away from the big man coming at him.

Grimmjow grimaced and tried to call out a quick warning, but was already too late, watching as the boy fell off the couch. He quickly took the few steps between himself and the couch, bending to check on his unexpected intruder, but the teen jolted away from him, staring up with wide eyes and unease etched across pale features. They were the strangest eyes Grimmjow had ever seen and it took him a moment, as he restudied the boy, to find words.

"It's ok, I'm not gonna hurt you." He finally reassured, pushing back his surprise. Gently, he took hold of the younger man's arm and started helping him off the floor and back to the couch. "Just sit for a minute, ok?"

He watched the kid carefully, and hid a grimace as the teen reached up to gingerly feel the bruise blossoming across pale skin at his hairline from where Grimmjow had knocked him out. Luckily, he didn't seem too off balance or dizzy, and Grimmjow wasn't so worried that he'd accidently hurt him more seriously.

Not a moment later, the microwave went off with a sharp chime and Grimmjow was a little surprised when the sudden sound had almost no effect on the kid at all. He'd seemed rather skittish, but the small alarm didn't earn so much as a flinch out of him. The big man straightened away from his guest, eyeing him in an appraising way, as he backed up a step before turning and leaving the room.

Shiro watched him go with eyes that were a little wider than normal, seated on the edge of the couch. Despite not being able to remember entering the man's home, he knew that's where he was and he knew the blue haired male leaving the room was the very same that had chased him earlier. It made him worry and he fidgeted slightly as he looked around. His papa had always made sure he knew he wasn't to leave the lab...he wasn't supposed to see other people, or interact with anyone. The whole 'no talking to strangers' thing had been taken to the extreme, despite that Shiro didn't really understand that. He only knew he wasn't supposed to let other people find him.

It didn't take long for the blue haired man to return. Shiro watched him as he neared, something wonderful smelling in his hands.

"Here."

The big man thrust a steaming bowl toward him and Shiro gave it a curious look, before his odd eyes traveled back upward to meet blue. He accepted the bowl and peered at the contents, taking his time in picking up the spoon that rested at its edge.

"Just leftovers from earlier," Grimmjow explained as the boy looked down into the bowl. He stepped back to give the kid some space, crossing his arms over his chest again as he watched. If his words were heard, the strange boy didn't show it as he dug in, too busy scarfing down the reheated, day old meal like he hadn't eaten in days. "Didn't figure you'd mind..." He added in a mumble.

The only evidence he got that he'd been heard was a quick, subtle shake of the boy's head as he stuck the spoon in his mouth and those odd golden eyes panned upward again.

Grimmjow frowned a bit and started to push away from the wall, "If I go grab the phone, will you call your parents?"

The boy shook his head and for half a second, automatically assuming the strange lad would agree, Grimmjow started to turn to go fetch the phone. Then he realized it had been a negative answer and he frowned. "Why not? Give me the number and I'll call, then."

"C'n I have my notebook back?"

Grimmjow's frown deepened, a bit of skepticism crossing his features.

"I think it's probably still outside..." Shiro continued, finishing the food given to him. Used to doing things for himself, he got up and wandered into the kitchen, curiously peeked around, and deposited the bowl in the sink when he found it.

Grimmjow watched him, a single brow raised. When the kid didn't reenter the sitting room, but instead headed toward the back door, Grimmjow pushed away from the wall again. He quickly crossed the space and flattened his hand against the door before it could be pulled open. The boy looked up at him with pale brows furrowed and Grimmjow said, "Stay here, sit back down. I'll go get it for you."

Shiro huffed an unhappy, petulant little breath, but when a kitchen chair was pulled out for him, he slid into it. Turning to look over his shoulder, he watched as the big man disappeared through the door with a final look, and pulled it closed behind himself. Then he turned back to the interior of the home and continued looking around.

It was much nicer than his and his father's home. A little cluttered maybe, but it actually looked lived in. It didn't look empty and dead like the main floor of the house he left his papa at. There was a stack of unopened mail sitting on the table, dishes in the sink. A clock hung on one wall and there were curtains over the windows. He wondered if there was a lab here, too.

Then the door was pushed open again and he turned back to the big man that owned the home. His sketchbook was dropped to the table top, but when he reached for it, it was pushed further from his reach. Shiro scowled unhappily at it and the hand still settled on its top, before redirecting his glare upward to meet blue eyes.

"Now, will you call your parents?" The bigger man asked.

Shiro sighed and shook his head again, "No. I can't." When he only earned a confused gaze, he rolled his eyes and continued, "I don't have 'ny parents ta call."

"Everyone has parents."

"Not everyone." Shiro snorted, "I don't."

"Guardians then," Grimmjow countered, crossing his arms over his chest in a stance that said he was leaving no room for argument. "You have to have some sort of guardian."

Shiro again shook his head and reached for his sketchbook. Again, a big hand reached down and pushed it further from his grasp. Angered, Shiro growled a rather vicious sound under his breath. He jerked back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest, like the big man before him had been. Refusing to look at the man, he glared off to the side, lip curled slightly.

Grimmjow studied him for a moment more, then sighed and shook his head a bit. Obviously, he was getting nowhere, so he switched to a different line of thinking. "Feel like telling me why you kept breaking into my property?"

Shiro ducked his head slightly, in an almost sheepish way, "No..." he muttered honestly.

"Why not?" Grimmjow asked, "Don't you think you owe me some answers?"

The boy merely shrugged, golden eyes refusing to lift and meet blue again.

"Well I think you do." Grimmjow stated, his voice stern. "Why were you running around in the middle of the woods at night? That shit's dangerous, you could have gotten seriously hurt." He still only received a shrug as the strange boy refused to say anything more.

Grimmjow sighed again, growing frustrated. The kid was so strange. Everything about him was off, different. Not just his looks, but the way he acted too. The bigger man openly studied the younger, still standing in front of the chair he'd instructed the boy to sit down in. After untangling him from the barbed wire and cleaning him up some, Grimmjow had noticed a few things that made him wonder if something more sinister was at play.

The kid was thin, not sickly so, but enough to make Grimmjow think he hadn't been eating well. The fact that the boy had been raiding his garden only furthered that theory. And though the paleness of his skin hid it well, the boy's arms were scared up like he'd never before seen. At first, he'd only noticed a series of raised marks on one of the boy's forearms. They looked like old teeth marks, an animal. It was normal enough, an encounter with a mean dog or something, so Grimmjow hadn't really worried about it. But after noticing it, he began noticing other marks, more worrying ones.

"Hey, kid, look at me." The bigger man grunted, half demanding but not overly harsh in his tone. Bent over the younger, he grabbed a pale wrist and pulled it toward him. "Are you a junkie?"

Shiro screwed up his features, automatically flipped his arm so that his palm was up; a learned reaction. "My name's Shiro, not kid..." He said with a small sneer and narrowed eyes, finally looking back at the bigger man, "And I dunno what that is."

Blue eyes narrowed icily, and calloused fingers ran over the small but many scars that marked the inside of the boy's elbow. "Don't play that game with me. Be honest." He demanded again, "You've got some serious marks, kid, are you a druggie?"

Again, Shiro only made a face, "I told ya, I dunno what that means!" He huffed, exasperated.

Straightening again, pulling out of the boy's face, Grimmjow released his arm and crossed his own over his chest again. He thought for a moment, studying pale features and strange eyes, and found he believed the boy. There was something very genuine and straightforward about him. Innocent.

"Ok, good." He concluded, glad he wouldn't be dealing with a teenager going through withdraw in a few hours. "Do you feel like telling me where your parents are yet?"

Shiro sighed, reached up to press the heel of his hand against his eye and rub like he was growing tired of all this. "I told ya this too. I don't got parents. Papapa said I was made in the lab."

"...are you sure you're not a junkie?"

Shiro grumbled something between a growl and a groan, and made to reach for his notebook again. The bigger man pulled it away from his reach. Gold on black eyes went wide, like he couldn't believe he was _still_ being denied his things, before narrowing dangerously as the pale teen bared teeth at the stranger.

"Gimme it back!" He demanded in a near yell, surging forward and grabbing for the dirty, old sketchpad. He snarled, showing outright aggression through his obvious anger, to the point of being almost animal about it.

Surprised by the outburst, Grimmjow took a physical step back before he handed over the notebook. "Fine, but you have to pay attention then, understand? I'm not getting in trouble for kidnapping a minor because you got lost and trespassed on my property."

"Hmph." Shiro snagged the notebook from the bigger man's hand, pulling it close to himself, but he nodded his agreement. Flipping it open, he found his last blank page and pulled out a blue pencil to begin doodling.

Grimmjow watched him for a moment, a thoughtful frown tugging at his features. Aside from his obvious appearance, there was something very off about the boy that had stumbled into his house. "Shiro?" He asked curiously, half expecting to be ignored. When he received a questioning hum in return, he continued, "How old are you?"

The kid shrugged a vague gesture as he drew, "Dunno. Four or five maybe."

There was a long silence, in which Grimmjow stared down at the teen and Shiro continued to draw. The bigger man cocked his head, features pulled into a look of serious skepticism. "Are you..." He grimaced, made a vague gesture with his hand toward his head, "you know, mentally...ok...?"

The sounds of pencil on paper stopped and Shiro looked up at him again, cocking a brow. "What's that mean?"

"You know..." Grimmjow repeated, having a hard time forcing it out without making himself sound like a jerk, "Are you...mentally handicapped?" He still got nothing but that small, confused little frown. He sighed, grimaced again. "Are you slow? You know, in the head?"

"I dun think so." Shiro shook his head, "There's nothin' wrong wit' me. Pappa just always said I was smarter than my age but not than my age." He paused, frowned again as he realized what he'd said didn't sound right. "I-I get words mixed up..." He admitted sheepishly, ducking his head slightly and remembering his creator's ire at his troubles, how many times he'd been snapped at for it. "I'm sorry..."

"No, it's fine..." The bigger man reassured, still puzzled by his surprise guest, but also intrigued. "You didn't do anything wrong."

"I meant size..." Shiro amended anyway, "I guess I look older than I am. I dunno. Tha's what papapa told me."

Now that he had the notebook, scratching his pencil against blank paper in simple but practiced motions, he seemed much more relaxed and willing to talk. The familiarity of drawing put him at ease in the new and rather overwhelming situation he found himself in.

"Your papa? Your dad?" Grimmjow knelt to put himself on the sitting boy's level. "Can you tell me where he is? He's probably worried about you..."

"No, he's not..." Shiro told him, going back to his drawing. The blue lead scratched a little bit harder, a little bit quicker than before. "I...he got hurt...and I couldn' wake him up..."

"Oh..." Grimmjow grimaced again, realizing the strange kid's dad must have passed away. "What about your mother? Do you know where she is? Maybe we could call her..."

"I don't have one. Papa said his wife died b'fore I was made."

"You mean born." Grimmjow corrected absently as he thought. Apparently both of the kid's parents were dead...or his real mother had abandoned him, if his father's wife was dead and wasn't his mother.

Shiro shook his head, but didn't look up. "No. Made."

Grimmjow's gaze very slowly refocused on the odd teen as he frowned all the harder.

A smile tugged across Shiro's pallid features and he turned the notebook around, showing off his handwork. In the picture, a surprisingly well drawn, blue haired man held another figure that had a recognizable lack of color. Impressed, blue brows rose slightly as Grimmjow looked at the drawing. He snorted a small laugh when he took note of the yellow halo above blue hair, but he realized that Shiro must have really appreciated his assistance. Coupled with the few strange things he'd said about his parents and the way he acted, Grimmjow wondered how well the boy had been treated in the past.

Shiro leaned forward a bit, grin still parting pale lips. "D'ya like it?"

"Yeah, it's great." Grimmjow nodded, one corner of his lips tilting up.

Shiro preened, and tapped the corner of the page with one finger, "I signed my name, means ya can keep it if ya wanna."

"Oh, well thank you." Grimmjow said, and watched how carefully the teenager began pulling the page from the notebook. When it was torn free and all the annoying, paper fringes were pulled away, he accepted the drawing. "I'll...hang it on my fridge, I guess."

The younger snorted and smirked up at the bigger man, "That's a weird place ta put it. And you think I'm strange."

At that, Grimmjow couldn't help but snort a laugh, a grin of his own stretching his features. He shook his head a bit and set the drawing aside where it wouldn't get bent up, then reached out to the boy. "C'mon, it's late. Let's get you situated on the couch so you can get some sleep."

Clearly he wasn't getting anywhere very quickly, maybe after a few more hours of rest, Shiro would be more willing to tell him who he should be trying to contact. The boy had just gone through a rather trying episode, after all. Grimmjow was a little surprised he didn't have a killer headache, after falling from the top of a fence and getting knocked out.

"I'm not sleepy." Shiro informed, but even as he did, he stood and reached up to rub at his eyes again.

Grimmjow grunted another laugh, "Well, then why don't you lay down and be quite so I can sleep, ok?"

"Ok." Shiro nodded again and let himself be led into the next room over. He stood by patiently, curiously studying the room again, as the bigger man went to find him a few spare blankets and a pillow. While Grimmjow readied the couch for him to sleep on, Shiro perked up at a sudden thought. His voice was eager when he asked, "Do you have a puppy?!"

"A puppy...?" Grimmjow turned a skeptical look over his shoulder, "No... I can't say that I do."

"Oh," Shiro deflated a bit, "ok."

Grimmjow patted the couch and stood by while his guest crawled onto it and began wiggling about to make himself comfortable. When Shiro seemed settled, he grabbed another blanket and unfolded it over the boy. "You like dogs?"

"Mhmm." Shiro mumbled as he pulled the edge of the blanket up under his chin. "I miss my puppy... Not the lil one, that one was mean ta me. It bit me when I was lil too. But I miss the big one. It was nice ta me and played wit' me..."

Grimmjow smirked as he listened. The more the kid talked the harder he got to understand as his words slurred tiredly and his strangely colored eyes fell closed. "Not tired. Right." He muttered, and grabbed a second blanket. He unfolded it halfway and laid it across the younger's feet, so he would be able to find it easily if he woke up cold. Then he turned out the light and left the room.

On his way by the table, he paused and debated for a moment, before grabbing the sketchbook the boy had left on the table after tearing the drawing out for him. He hesitated to open it, feeling like he was intruding with how protective over the thing the boy had been, but he flipped it open and skimmed through the first few pages. He found little drawings of all kinds of things; jars, computers, he smiled a bit as he found a dark brown dog with an off colored leg. But the further he flipped, the more confused he grew and an almost dark expression settled over his features. He found beakers and test tubes and forceps, all manner of expensive and complicated equipment and eventually a massive, almost fish tank looking thing that obviously wasn't meant to hold fish if all the buttons and gadgets on it were anything to go by.

Frowning, Grimmjow flipped through a few more pages, until he found a page that had been filled with nothing but angry, red, shapeless scribbles. The next page was of an older man in a lab coat. Then another of him laying on the floor, more red staining the entire bottom half of the page like it would drip from the notebook and spatter against the flooring.

Grimmjow quickly flipped to the next page, but the nature of the drawings completely changed. Now he found things from outside; trees, birds, a deer, other various plants, even an old, dilapidated house that looked to be abandoned, one of the windows broken.

Slowly shutting the sketchbook, he put it back where he'd picked it up from and headed toward his bedroom. He'd hoped to get this all taken care of and over with, no hassle, no messy reports, but maybe he'd have to call the police after all.

That next morning, Shiro still passed out on the couch, sprawled out upon his stomach, with his arm and a leg hanging off the edge, Grimmjow quietly peeked into the room, before pulling his phone from his pocket and leaving. He ran a hand through his hair as he dialed a quick number, then stared down at the screen for a few moments. Dropping heavily into one of the chairs that sat around his kitchen table, he looked over his shoulder towards the doorway that led into the sitting room. All was still quiet from within.

With a sigh, he pressed the button to connect the call and brought the phone to his ear. He didn't have many options, after all. There was a young teen in his house, a stranger with no ID, apparently no parents, and all he would give was his first name. Calling the police was the most logical option open to him. He could figure out where the boy belonged, get him the help he seemed to need, and it would keep Grimmjow himself out of trouble should it turn out the kid had run away or been taken and escaped or something equally as scary but possible.

And yet the idea of having someone take the kid away settled strangely in his gut. Shiro wasn't normal. There was something strange, something very different about him, something that needed protecting and Grimmjow had no idea why.

He was pulled from his thoughts when a woman answered the line, trying to greet him for the second or third time, "Hello? Is this an emergency? Can you give me your location?"

"What-no. No, sorry, uh-" Grimmjow mentally shook himself, "No, I didn't have the non-emergency number... I'm sorry, could you possibly give it to me?"

"Yes, of course."

The woman on the other end rattled off a number and Grimmjow quickly scribbled it down. After apologizing again, and thanking the woman, he hung up and began punching in the new number.

He pulled the phone to his ear again as the couch springs from the other room groaned quietly with the shifting of the weight settled upon them.

From the other end of the line, the ringing quickly stopped, "City police department, is this an emergency?"

Grimmjow half rolled his eyes, head bowing as he rubbed his fingers along his temple, "No, not really-"

"Alright then," the dispatcher said, "please hold while we transfer you to our next available operator."

The big man started to respond, but there was a quiet beep before equally quiet music played in the background and he sighed instead. Not half a second later, he jolted in surprise, eyes flying wide, as the phone was very unexpectedly yanked from his hand.

He turned in a rush to find Shiro pouting, brows furrowed, as he pushed buttons. After a few tries, he found the right one and the line went dead.

"Shiro!" Grimmjow stood, features dropping the stunned expression and gaining a stern one instead, "What are you-"

"You were gonna tell on me!" Shiro practically shouted back, looking angry and wronged, maybe even a little hurt. "Papapa said nobody can know 'bout me...you can't tell on me..."

The bridge of Grimmjow's nose crinkled, blue eyes narrowing slightly, but there was no anger in his features as he looked at the teen. "Shiro..." He said slowly, gently, "You had to come from somewhere, someone has to be missing you... I can't keep you here..."

"Fine, then I'll go." Shiro moved to grab his dirty, old notebook and headed toward the door, "Just...don' tell on me...papa would be mad..."

"Wait...wait." Grimmjow followed after the boy. He sighed, pushing the door closed again before the odd young man had a chance to walk through it. Scrubbing a hand over his features, he looked down at the kid, "You aren't some stray animal, Shiro, I can't just keep you. Things don't work that way."

Shiro frowned, eyes dragging away from startling blue to settle on the door again. He tugged at the doorknob, but the bigger man's hand was still planted in the middle, keeping it shut.

"But," Grimmjow continued, "I guess...you can stay until I figure out what's going on, ok?"

Golden eyes widened as Shiro turned back to the blue haired man, hand tentatively leaving the doorknob. "Ya wont tell on me...?"

The big man sighed a short, strained breath and closed his eyes, but nodded all the same, "I wont tell..."

A grin stretched across pale features. He had very little experience with other people, and even less with people that were so nice to him. So when Grimmjow had tended to his few wounds, fed him, gave him a place to sleep and talked to him, even if it had been questioning, to Shiro, that meant they were already friends. The blue haired stranger was already someone he liked.

"But," Grimmjow yet again started and Shiro's wide smile lessoned a touch, "since you messed up my fence and my garden, you have to help me fix it. Sounds fair?"

Shiro nodded almost eagerly, setting his notebook back down on the table. Not even twenty minutes later, Grimmjow was shirtless under the hot sun, leather gloves on as he started on his fence. Having assigned the task to the strange boy, he kept an eye on Shiro as the pale lad tended to the garden, pulling the things that Grimmjow had explained to him didn't belong and leaving the vegetables alone. He straightened a few tomato cages, picked up the mess he'd left behind the night before, and watered the plants.

By the time the two were done, Shiro was muddy and dirt smeared and both were in need of a shower. Grimmjow pulled his work gloves off, dropped them on the edge of his patio, and clapped a hand over Shiro's shoulder as he guided the boy back inside. Shiro was halfway through the doorway when he jerked to a sudden stop, making the bigger man nearly run him over, and leaned backward to peek outside again. Then he frowned up at Grimmjow, "You said you didn't have a pupu-" He frowned harder, grumbled a short, frustrated sound, "puppy..."

Grimmjow frowned right back down at him, "I don't..." but when golden eyes coasted away and back out toward the fence line, Grimmjow followed Shiro's gaze and found the cat slinking around. His frown deepened, gaining a thoughtful quality. "That's a cat, Shiro."

"Oh...not a puppy?" Shiro glanced back up at Grimmjow, before looking back towards the little animal again. "I thought maybe it just looked funny like I do and like my lil pup-ppy did..."

Unsure what to say, the bigger man hesitated for a moment before stepping back. "If you promise not to hurt her this time, I'll let you hold her."

The boy lit up happily, exclaiming excitedly, "I promise!"

Grimmjow grunted an amused sound and nodded toward the cat. Shiro eagerly followed behind him. The cat thought to scurry away and made to run, but the bigger man ignored her protests and bent to pull her from the ground. She wiggled for a moment, but after she'd settled down, Grimmjow passed her over to the strange lad that had fallen into his care.

Carefully, Shiro cradled the cat close with one arm and petted orange fur with the hand of his other as he followed the blue haired man into the house. Once inside, Grimmjow shut the door behind them to keep the hot air out, and left Shiro standing beside his small table as he disappeared further into the house. Shiro didn't seem to mind, nor really even notice, too enthralled with making friends with the cat he held.

When Grimmjow returned, holding a bundle of clean clothing, he gently took the cat from Shiro's hands, earning a pout, and set the animal down. It meowed up at the boy before turning to lazily wander into a different room. Shiro waved at it, smile back.

Shaking his head, Grimmjow handed the clean clothing over, "It'll be a little big on you, but it'll have to work until we get a load of laundry done. Bathroom is just down the hall, on the right. Just leave your dirty clothes by the door when you get in so I can grab 'em."

Shiro did just that, heading down the hallway to find the shower, not shy in the least. It took him a few minutes to navigate the hot and cold dials, since he'd only ever taken just one bath without Isshin's help before, but he figured it out quickly enough, stripped, and left his dirty, mud smeared clothing folded neatly by the door before he hopped in.

Grimmjow waited for the water to start running, giving the boy a few minutes to get in, before he cracked the door open and grabbed the dirty clothing so he could throw it in the washer with his own clothing.

While he loaded the washing machine, he heaved a sigh and contemplated his options. He couldn't just keep a lost child, and Shiro wasn't even a normal kid. As harsh as it may have seemed, there was something wrong with him and Grimmjow had no way of knowing if Shiro had special needs; medication, a certain routine, a specific diet. What if certain things triggered habits or fits or upset the teen? Grimmjow wouldn't know how to handle the kid.

But with the way Shiro had reacted to catching him, Grimmjow knew he couldn't just call the police, even if that's exactly what he should have been doing. Closing the machine, Grimmjow turned and leaned against it, crossing his arms over his chest as he absently listened to the sound of running water from the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, Shiro came down the hall, his hair wet and hanging around his shoulders, the short sleeves of Grimmjow's shirt hanging down to his elbows. One hand was fisted in the waist of the jeans he wore, holding them up as he tread on the pant-legs.

Grimmjow looked up at him, smirking at the picture he was faced with, and went to find a belt for the boy. A few seconds later, he returned to find that Shiro had planted himself at the kitchen table and was busy doodling in the margin of an already drawn on page in his sketchbook. He set the belt down on the table and disappeared down the hall again, digging through a cupboard until he found a notebook. Coming back to the kitchen, he dropped it next to the boy.

Shiro looked at it, then up at the bigger man as his scratching pencil fell still.

"It's lined, and half the pages are probably written on, but if you want, you can draw in it."

The pale teen eagerly enough closed his already full sketchbook and opened up the new one that had been presented to him, flipping pages until he found a blank one. He began drawing right away, hardly even thinking about what his subject matter would be or bothered by his spectator.

Grimmjow watched him for a moment, before disappearing again to take his own shower and get into clean clothing.

By the time he was done and came back to the kitchen, Shiro had quit drawing and was looking at some of the written on pages of the borrowed notebook. Curiosity lit his features as his golden eyes scanned the pages, drinking in the handwriting, despite that there couldn't have been anything written there of any interest.

After a moment, the boy's features lit up and his hand shot out as he pointed, "This one's a 'S'."

Grimmjow pushed a smile on through the furrowing of his brows, looking down at the notebook to see an S written in his messy scrawl. He nodded, agreeing, then looked back to the teen's features. "Do you know how to read, Shiro?"

The strange lad shrugged, "I know a few."

"A few..?"

"Mhmm." He nodded, still scanning the page curiously, "I know S, and I know H, and R and I and O."

"So you know how to spell your name?" Grimmjow cocked a brow slightly, blue eyes narrowing slightly.

"Mhmm." Shiro hummed again, "Papapa taught me, so I c'n sign my drawin's."

"He didn't teach you the other letters?" When he earned only a shake of the boy's head, Grimmjow's frown turned into something a little angrier, a little more outraged, perhaps. It only seemed further evidence towards his thoughts about how poorly the boy was being treated by whoever was supposed to be taking care of him. "Can you count?"

"Mhmm, course I can count." Shiro scoffed, like it was unthinkable. "I'm not dumb."

Grimmjow grunted, "I know, I didn't mean you were. But you can count? So you know numbers?"

Shiro nodded, "The same way I know words."

Frowning again, the bigger man reached further across the table and grabbed a pen. In his messy but legible handwriting, he jotted down a few random numbers in the margin of the written on page Shiro was scanning through. "Can you tell me what those are?"

The lad frowned at them for a moment, before he leaned back in the chair, away from the notebook, and crossed his arms unhappily. "Are you makin' fun a me b'coz I can't read...?"

"What? No-! Of course not-" He was cut off before he could say anything further.

"I don' b'lieve you." The teen muttered, propping an elbow on the table and almost angrily pulling the notebook from under Grimmjow's hand. He yanked it open to a blank sheet and stole the pen from Grimmjow's hand, instantly huddling over the page as the pen began scratching over the lines of the paper. "I don' care what ya think..." He muttered even more quietly, "I'm not dumb."

"Shiro, I didn't-" But again, he was cut off as Shiro turned on him fast enough that the bigger man actually flinched.

"It's not my fault!" Shiro hissed at him, angry and defensive. The lines of his body were pulled tight with sudden, explosive aggression. "I don' know why he didn't like me! It's not my fault he didn't teach me ta read!"

"Alright," Grimmjow said lowly, calmly as he slowly patted the air in a placating way. "Easy there, kid."

Shiro curled his lip, strange eyes narrowed dangerously.

"Shiro, sorry." Grimmjow quickly corrected, only just now realizing that the teen had climbed to his feet and stood facing him with a clenched jaw and bared teeth. Like the night before, when he'd tried taking the boy's sketchbook from him, Grimmjow was faced with sudden, volatile rage. "Hey, take it easy, ok? Sit back down..."

Instead of trying to force Shiro back into the chair, though, he reached over and dragged another closer, taking a seat himself. He looked up at the teen for a few moments, watched the lad's chest rise and fall under the too big shirt in controlled, heavy breaths. But after those few moments, Shiro slowly sank back into the chair he'd previously been occupying, holding the gaze of blue eyes for only a moment longer before he turned back to the notebook and began scribbling on the paper again. A moment later, it was like nothing had happened at all.

Grimmjow snorted a quiet sound as he observed the strange lad. After a moment, he relaxed a bit and leaned back in the chair he'd seated himself in. Well, if the boy couldn't read -numbers included- than he guessed he wasn't going to get an address out of the kid. And Shiro had already made clear that neither of them would be calling anyone, though he probably didn't know the phone number of whoever was supposed to be looking after him anyway.

"Shiro?" He waited for a very slightly inquisitive hum before he continued, "Do you think you could show me how to get to where you live?"

Shiro shrugged as he doodled, and pulled one had away from the paper to point, "That way."

With a frown, Grimmjow glanced in the indicated direction before thinking for a moment. In relation to the small road that stretched passed his home at the end of his driveway, '_that way'_ meant Shiro lived even further from town than he did. But that was impossible. The next city over was hours away by car, and next to nothing sat between there and where Grimmjow lived. "Are you sure it's that way?"

"Mhmm, that's the way I came from ta get here." The pen never stopped scratching and Shiro was quiet for a moment, before ashen brows furrowed. "Why?" Then he finally looked up and quit doodling, very quietly saying, "... I don't wanna go back..."

Everything about that pulled at something in Grimmjow and he merely stared back at the younger for a moment. Then his brows furrowed and he set his features to something more stern, more determined. "Maybe you wont have to go back, but you still need to show me where it is."

"But if I don't gotta go back, why d'ya need ta know where it is?"

"Because I don't think I like whoever is supposed to be taking care of you and I want to talk with them." Grimmjow told the boy, "And after that, depending on what happens, you might be coming back here with me so we can figure out what to do next. We can go from there."

"D'you think ya can wake papapa up?" Shiro asked, almost eagerly.

Grimmjow hesitated, remembering what the teen had said the night before. "I don't know about that..."

"Oh..." Looking back at his paper, Shiro continued drawing, confused on how the bigger man expected to talk to anyone at his house if he couldn't wake his father up.

Climbing to his feet, the blue haired man pushed his chair back where it belonged and marveled at the fact that only minutes ago, Shiro had been seething with anger. Now the teen seemed perfectly calm, all traces of his aggression gone as suddenly as it had come. He snorted and patted the kid on the shoulder, "Come on, you can bring the notebook if you want."

"I can?" He asked happily, features lighting up, only to fall not even a moment later. "We're goin' back now...?"

"Yep, might as well get it over with, right?"

Shiro snorted and closed his notebook, "Guess so."

Not long later, the two were climbing into Grimmjow's truck and it quickly became obvious that vehicles were a new thing for the teen. The bigger man had to show him how to buckle the seatbelt and when he finally backed from the driveway, a childlike wonder had filled strange eyes as Shiro watched the scenery go by. It left Grimmjow all the more confused about what exactly he was dealing with when it came to the odd teen.

"Have you never been in a car before...?" The bigger man asked, trying to mask the disbelieving skepticism in his voice. Headed in the direction Shiro had indicated while they'd been sitting in the kitchen, he glanced away from the road and towards the kid sitting shotgun.

Shiro shook his head, not pulling his attention away from inspecting everything. "Papapa had one, I think, but I was never 'llowed ta go outside, so I never been in it."

The rest of the drive was quiet, each lost in their respective thoughts. As he sat in silence, nothing but the truck's engine as white noise, and minutes stretched by into nearly a half hour, Grimmjow wondered if Shiro really knew where they were going. Wherever their destination was, he hoped he would at least find a few answers.

Not even ten minutes later, Shiro's watery voice shattered the silence. "Stop!" He ordered, spinning around in his seat and pointing. Grimmjow hit the breaks, taken off guard and unsure what the teen had seen. "There, we went passed it." The boy explained as the truck rocked to a stop.

Grimmjow turned a bit looking in the indicated direction, behind himself but towards his side of the vehicle. He found nothing but trees and shadowed woods. "I don't...think this is it, Shiro..."

"No, it's back there." Shiro insisted, still pointing. "See? Behind the trees." He turned back to face forward, grabbing the seatbelt as he fumbled with the latch.

Grimmjow frowned, searching the trees. It took him a moment to realize what the strange teen was talking about. There, maybe a half-mile from the road and very nearly lost in overgrowth and hidden behind unchecked trees, a dilapidated old house sat. Whatever color it used to be was faded away, the paint peeling with age and neglect. Clearly it had seen better days.

Reaching across, Grimmjow blindly settled his hand over Shiro's, halting the boy from unbuckling and climbing from the truck. "That's it?" He asked, voice low, "That's where you came from?"

"Mhmm." Shiro nodded, ceasing his efforts with the seatbelt and looking across the bigger man to peer out the driver side window.

The bigger man pulled his hand away and shifted the truck into reverse, backing down the road at a careful pace as he searched the side of the street for the overgrown, old driveway to the abandoned house. It didn't take long for them to come upon it and Grimmjow shifted back into first as he turned the truck down the drive. To his surprise, the narrow driveway wasn't as overgrown and impassable as he'd expected. Nothing large was left to lay in the way, fallen from the trees above, and no overly large potholes or ruts showed were it hadn't been taken care of and had been allowed to be reclaimed by nature. It actually looked somewhat used and twin tracks of nearly bare dirt showed were car tires went back and forth often enough to kill the less hardy, thicker growing plants that would have otherwise tried to take over the open space.

The ride was a little bumpy, a little slow, as Grimmjow eased his truck up the winding drive, avoiding the worst of the pits and hollows he found. A few minutes later, he was shutting the engine off, staring out the windshield as he studied the old house. For such an old, decaying building, the important parts looked surprisingly functional once up close. The roof wasn't sagging, solid below weathered shingles. The front door looked sturdy in its worn framework.

Grimmjow pushed his door open, exiting the vehicle, still eyeing the house and looking for signs of whoever Shiro was supposed to be living with. Fidgeting with the seatbelt a little, Shiro followed his lead. Unlike the bigger man, the teen didn't hesitate as he walked up the rest of the drive and toward the house.

Grimmjow quickly followed behind him, not willing to let the boy wander far, just in case. They trooped right up to the door and the bigger man settled his hand on the smaller's shoulder, keeping him close by. He couldn't help but notice that the doorknob, set into the weathered wood of the door, looked nearly brand new. Extra locks had been installed, shining, heavy deadbolts meant to keep intruders out.

Blue brows furrowed as Grimmjow hesitantly raised his fist and knocked on the door. The pounding echoed through the house before falling silent. He waited a moment, Shiro at his side and not nearly as uneasy as the bigger man was. In fact, the teen acted like all this was normal, like nothing was out of place in the least.

When no one answered the door, Grimmjow tried again, his scowl deepening. At his side, Shiro frowned as well. He looked up at the older male, then back to the door, before shrugging from under the hand on his shoulder.

Grimmjow made a half effort to reach for him as he pulled away, "Hey, Shi-"

"We'll have ta go in the same way I got out." The boy said, his tone making it seem that the answer should have been obvious.

"How's that..?" The blue haired man took one last look at the door, and followed as Shiro rounded the small house. He caught up in time to watch Shiro pick his way through glass littered grass towards a broken window. "Wow, careful there, kid."

Shiro turned a quick glare on him, but continued to the window. He braced his hands on a clear space of the frame before pulling himself up and through to land on the couch he'd pulled up next to the wall for the dog's sake. It seemed like forever ago and as he entered the gloom of what had been the only home he'd ever known and he was forced to face all the shadows he'd left behind, his glare turned into a frown. Then dropped into a pout as he stood in the middle of the sitting room, looking around. He'd never noticed before, having had nothing to compare it to, but his home suddenly seemed so cold, so empty.

Grimmjow ducked through the window behind him, his work boots landing with a dull thump and a creak on old flooring. He straightened, walking up behind the teen that had quite literally stumbled into his home as he looked around.

There were no personal touches, no pictures or random, nonessential items. There was no decoration or theme to give the space character, to hint at the owner's tastes and personality. It was bare, blank. Like Shiro was.

He glanced back to the boy, brows still furrowed and lips curved downward. Shiro looked back up at him with a slightly widened gaze, before grabbing his hand and heading toward the back of the house. "I stayed mostly downstairs," he muttered, leading Grimmjow to a narrow, encased staircase that led only downward, "b'coz that's where papa was most a the time."

The moment they hit that very first step, the smell assaulted them like running into a wall. Grimmjow gagged, eyes watering. He brought his hand up to cover his mouth and nose and looked at the boy leading him.

Not unaffected, Shiro seemed to hesitate. He looked almost scared, panicked even. Or very upset. It was then that Grimmjow remembered what the kid had told him, about how he hadn't been able to wake his father up and Grimmjow realized what he was smelling.

Blue eyes widened as he and Shiro continued down the stairs. Almost afraid of what he'd find, he stepped onto the hard, concrete flooring of an unfurnished basement, only to round a small divider wall to find that the large, open space was far from unfinished.

The lights overhead were still on, and an unnatural stillness had settled over the place. In the corner nearest him, a large mound of rumpled bedding and towels sat, the fabric showing old stains that Grimmjow could only guess to be blood. All around them, lab equipment gleamed under the harsh lighting; metal, glass, plastic, some of it in various colors, all of it pristine and precise. Near the far wall, a metal table had been knocked askew, sheets of paper scattered across the floor in a disarray that didn't match the rest of the basement. A dark, drying stain marred the floor below the table.

Tentatively stepping nearer, Grimmjow rounded the table, grimacing and nearly flinching away as he found what was left of a man in a lab coat. At his side, Shiro whimpered an almost animal sound. He frowned and gently pushed Shiro back again, away from the body of his father.

"Jesus," He muttered, taking one last look before backing away also. There was no need to check for a pulse. The man was clearly gone. "We're going to have to call the police, Shiro... we can't just leave him here..."

"No..." Shiro whimpered, truly sounding like a child, "Papapa said no one can know 'bout me...they'll take me away..."

Grimmjow ignored him and swung around, grabbing the boy by both shoulders so that Shiro was forced to look at him. "What happened here, Shiro?" He asked, very slowly, in a way that didn't leave room for any games.

"I dunno-"

"Shiro!" Big hands tightened their grip, but Grimmjow wasn't trying to hurt the kid. He only wanted answers, like he had when he'd decided they'd make the trip out here. This wasn't something he knew how to deal with and it made no sense. He'd been put into a very tough situation; an identity-less, unusual child, a dead body. What was he supposed to do? Supposed to think?

"I dunno!" Shiro repeated, reaching up with one hand to circle pale fingers around Grimmjow's wrist. With his other, he pointed toward the table. "He-he was gonna take more blood but there was already somethin' in it! It hurt and I was scared...!"

Blue brows furrowed as Grimmjow's grip loosened, "Take more..." but even as he started to repeat what he'd been told, he grabbed Shiro's arm and flipped it over, looking at all the track marks marring pale flesh. "Your dad did this to you?"

Shiro only shrugged, like it wasn't a big deal, but there was a slight tremble to his body. He pulled his arm away and fisted his hand to rub at his eyes. "I don't wanna be here 'nymore..." He practically whispered.

Grimmjow nodded slightly, both agreeing and understanding the sentiment. He straightened out of the boy's face and again tugged Shiro protectively close by the shoulder. But they couldn't leave yet, he still had to figure out what was going on. Why would a man lock his own child away from the world? Why would have Shiro been treated the way he had? There were too many unanswered questions for Grimmjow to leave things as they were.

Continuing his search of the basement turned laboratory, he wandered away from the body and toward another row of metal counters and drawers. One had been converted into a desk of sorts. On its top sat stack upon stack of number and letter filled papers, of diagrams and charts and statistics, none of which Grimmjow knew what were for. A glass jar had been used as a pencil holder, filled with highlighters, pens, a ruler. An old leather wallet sat nearby, opened like someone had been digging through it, or forgotten to return whatever had been pulled from it.

Grimmjow picked it up, searching for an ID. The license he found wasn't quite what he'd been searching for. Rather than a driver's license, he found a keycard with a photo of the dead man; Dr. Isshin Kurosaki of Karakura Inc. and Laboratories: leading Geneticist and head scientist.

The big man frowned, wondering why that name sounded familiar. The city the facility was named after was a long drive, several days away. It wasn't a distance that could be driven back and forth for work.

A thoughtful expression etched into his features, Grimmjow set the wallet back down, the keycard laid down next to it. He slowly wandered away from the desk area, looking around as he went. Clearly Shiro had been being honest with him. This was where he'd come from, but from what he'd seen, there was no evidence to even show Shiro's existence here. What kind of father didn't have a single photo of his child in his home? Hell, even in his wallet or his workspace or whatever this place was.

Then his eyes landed on a closed door in the back wall. Crossing the space, he tried the doorknob to find it locked. Turning to Shiro, who stood almost too quietly in the center of the laboratory area, he asked, "What's in here?"

The teen shook his head, eyes edging passed Grimmjow to peer at the door, "Dunno... papa never lemme see inside."

"Never?" Grimmjow turned back to the door, "Do you know where he keeps the key?"

Shiro nodded, even though the big man wasn't looking, and pointed toward the body of his creator. "Papa keeps 'em wit' him."

Grimmjow grimaced, but turned away from the door and back toward the body laying on the floor. He wasn't naturally a very queasy guy. Blood and gore had never bothered him, but this wasn't like a movie. The smell was the worst. It was nauseating, to say the least.

But answers were something he needed before he could determine what his best course of action was, so he tugged the collar of his shirt up over the lower half of his face and tried not to loose his lunch as he neared the body. He checked the pockets of the lab coat first, finding nothing more than the expected; a pencil, a glass stir stick of some sort. The body was cold, stiff and once dark colored eyes were still open, clouded over and foggy in death. Grimmjow moved on to the deceased's pant pockets, finally hearing the rattle of keys as he dug around.

Pulling them free, he quickly, gladly, jumped to his feet and moved away from the body. Back to the door. There were half a dozen keys on the ring, most likely several of which went to the ridiculous locks on the front door. They jingled as Grimmjow flipped through them, looking for one that might match the lock in the door hidden below the house.

He found the right one after his second try, and slipped the key into the lock. He pushed the door open to find a dark room. Nothing but blackness was visible, dark, smudged shapes of furniture or other objects in the room. Grimmjow wandered in, hand creeping along the wall in search of a light switch he couldn't seem to find. The room was locked for a reason, maybe this was where he'd find his answers.

He vaguely heard as Shiro crept in behind him, almost tentative to enter a room he'd previously been banned from.

Grimmjow edged around something large standing in the center of the room. In the dark, with only the light flooding in from the main room, he could only see a glint of reflection on glass as he passed it. He dismissed it and moved on, still searching for a light switch as he ran his hand over shelves. Accidently knocking over a picture frame, he jumped slightly, carefully steadying it before it could fall and break. He couldn't see the picture very well in the dark, only the smudge of what looked like two people, one clearly younger than the other. The frown alleviated from his features slightly, thinking it must have finally been something to show that this doctor had cared for his odd son.

A file cabinet was the next thing to catch his eye, the metal it was made of dully reflecting the small amount of light that reached inside the room. Kneeling before it, he squinted at the labels, trying to make out what was written in dark ink against white strips.

The doctor's handwriting was messy, barely legible, but even then, the simple, five letter word was easily recognizable. Shiro's name marked the first drawer, like he was some sort of specimen, something to be studied. But the man was a scientist, a doctor. Grimmjow supposed keeping important records and documents in a filing cabinet probably wasn't so strange.

Pulling the drawer open, he pulled out the first folder and flipped it open, not sure what he expected to be able to read in the dark. A moment later, as he grumbled, the lights came on and he heard Shiro moving toward the center of the room.

"Thanks, kid." He said absently, already absorbed in what sat in front of him. His features pulled tight as he looked through graphs and charts and records. What he read made no sense. Shiro's name was only brought up after he'd already scanned through the first several pages, and everything he saw spoke of the boy like he wasn't even human. Talk of cloning, of synthetic and artificial creation. He read about rapid growth and a stunted mind. "What...is this..." Flipping through more pages, he found the records of weekly blood work and handwritten notes about observations of Shiro's growing personality and development.

"Shiro?" Grimmjow almost frantically turned back to the very first page of the file he held, where it read of success in growing a human clone. "What was he doing to you..?" At the top of the page, he found a date. Blue eyes went wide. According to the scientist's private records, Shiro's birthday would be in a couple weeks.

And he would be five years old.

The childishness in his actions and his speaking wasn't some sort of disorder, then... Shiro really was... Grimmjow could hardly wrap his mind around what he was reading. The kid he'd thought had been a runaway teenager was actually some sort of twisted laboratory experiment. But the biggest surprise had yet to present itself.

It was then that Grimmjow realized how quiet Shiro had gone, how all movement had stopped behind him.

He turned around to find the boy staring up at the glass case he'd seen earlier upon entering and floating almost peacefully inside the tank, a young man. It took Grimmjow a few seconds to find his wits, as he stared at the figure within. He hardly even realized he was walking, rounding the tank so that he stood at Shiro's side and looked up at the figure.

Orange hair, grown out to nearly shoulder length, flowed around peaceful features. His eyes were closed, lashes long and a dusting of freckles just barely stood out against fair skin. His jaw and chin was strong, yet narrow and pointed, his cheekbones high but not sharp. Despite that he looked to be in his early to mid twenties, there was still a boyish handsomeness to his features.

His body was relaxed, long limbs held in an easy, weightless position that suggested he'd been floating in the tank for quite some time. Long enough that his body had settled into a natural pose. Had it not been for the tubes and wires leading from his body, it would have almost appeared that the young man slept submerged there. For all that was obviously wrong with him, he was beautiful.

After a moment, Grimmjow finally dragged his stunned gaze away from the man in the tank to look back at the boy that he'd found in his garden. Shiro still stared up at the tank, giving the bigger man a clear view of his profile, of pointed but not sharp features and full lips. Even the set to his brow and his hairline was the same. In all but color and apparent age, Shiro was the other's copy.

Grimmjow looked from Shiro, back to the more colorful male in the tank, and back, unsure what to say, what to even think. The moment broke as he watched pale brows slowly furrow and Shiro's bottom lip tremble slightly. Obviously, Shiro had come to the same conclusion.

"B-but..." Gold on black eyes searched the naturally flushed features before them, confusion and uncertainty in their depths, "Papapapa... I-but..."

The blue haired man dropped a gentle but firm hand on the smaller's shoulder, turning Shiro away from the tank. He tugged the boy close to his side and guided him from the small room. "It's ok, Shiro..." It was suddenly more than clear where the pale lad had come from, and now it made sense why Shiro always said no one could know about him. Dr. Kurosaki, a name Grimmjow had heard on every news channel and in every paper for months when the man and his son had first gone missing years ago, had created Shiro. The boy was meant to be nothing more than a donor, marked for death before he'd even started living. "It's ok... we can leave now, ok?"

As they left, Shiro stared over his shoulder at what he was supposed to have been, at what he was supposed to have become.

••• a few days later •••

"You sure about this?"

Shiro looked over at the bigger man and nodded.

"Alright. If you change your mind, you can stay in the truck, ok?" After they'd stumbled upon not only the body of Shiro's caretaker, but the unexpected young man the scientist had created Shiro in the image of, Grimmjow had taken the pale lad back to his house. The drive had been silent as Shiro stared out the window, his knees drawn up and a disgruntled frown on his features. Grimmjow had drawn his conclusion and by the time they'd made it back to his house, he'd known what he'd do.

Shiro would be staying with him. He wasn't willing to let the boy be taken away, not after realizing that should he call the proper authorities, the lad would be locked up again, probably experimented on. He was a work of science, something straight out of a twisted science-fiction book. The moment it was realized what he was, he'd have to go through all the things his creator had subjected him to before. Maybe more.

The kid had a mind of his own. He was young and his developing mind showed that, but he was smart and self aware. Grimmjow didn't know if he could technically be called a human, but he was still a person.

So when they had gotten back, Grimmjow had sat the younger down on the couch, knelt in front of him, and told him that it didn't matter what had happened or what they had found, that he would never have to go back. Shiro had nearly started crying, telling the bigger man that hadn't meant to hurt anyone, that he didn't want to be taken away.

After a few hours of talking -during which Shiro had done his best to explain some of the things Grimmjow had speculated about while in that lab- Grimmjow had moved to sit on the couch next to the boy. Eventually, Shiro had fallen asleep leaning against him. Unwilling to wake the poor kid up after such a stressful past several days, not to mention all the abuse and trauma he'd faced in his few years of life, Grimmjow had sat in silence, deep in thought while he let Shiro rest.

"Ok." Shiro nodded again, bending where he sat in the passenger seat of Grimmjow's truck. He hefted the large, flat topped stone they'd found and selected, tugging it into his lap. Pale fingertips traced over the engraved words, carefully cut into the stone by Grimmjow. "Are ya sure this is how ta spell his name?"

Grimmjow glanced over at him as he drove. A small smile tugged at handsome features, "I'm sure. Do you want to see the paper again?"

After the boy had chosen which stone they'd be using, he'd lugged it all the way back to Grimmjow's house, insisting upon carrying it himself. They'd cleaned and polished it until all the dirt and moss from sitting out in the woods for who knew how long was gone and nothing but shining grey rock was left, shot through with veins of pinks and purples. A little research was all it took for Grimmjow to come up with a name. He'd showed the pictures to Shiro, and Shiro had agreed that it was the same young man they'd found in his creator's lab. That orange hair was unmistakable.

They'd taken hours to carefully mark out and carve the name into the stone. Then, after making Grimmjow show him the old newspaper articles they'd dug up again, Shiro had very carefully compared the shapes of all the letters on the paper to the shapes of those Grimmjow had carved into the stone, making sure that they were right even though he couldn't really read them.

When the boy was satisfied, Grimmjow had re-cleaned the stone, polished it until it was nearly as smooth as marble, and painted it in a sealant so that it wouldn't weather as fast.

Shiro shook his head, looking down at the headstone they'd made.

Grimmjow turned back to the road, "Remember what I told you?"

"Mhmm." Shiro went back to carefully tracing his fingertip over the first letter, quietly repeating what Grimmjow had explained to him, "I" he moved to the next one, "C" and continued until he'd spelled out the entire name; Ichigo Kurosaki.

Grimmjow was impressed with how quickly the boy had understood what each of the letters looked like and what part of the word, what sound, they made. He wasn't hard to teach at all. It was a shame that the man Shiro had thought of as a father hadn't bothered to teach the boy anything. It was sad, really, but Shiro didn't really understand how much he'd been denied -not just in the education department, but in the quality of his life and his experiences in general- and Grimmjow wouldn't take that ignorance from him. He wouldn't point out just how horribly he'd been treated and muddy the image Shiro had of his father.

When they turned down the overgrown driveway, Shiro looked up from the stone and watched the house he'd been created in draw near.

Made, not born.

The words echoed in Grimmjow's mind. He smiled and glanced at the boy sitting shotgun. Dr. Kurosaki had had no idea what he'd created. He'd been too blinded, too desperate and too far gone to realize and appreciate his handy work.

They parked the truck and Shiro climbed from the passenger seat, heavy stone in hand. Grimmjow rounded the truck and pulled a couple shovels from the bed, as well as a few tarps and white sheets.

Walking around back, Grimmjow let Shiro lead the way as he picked the perfect spot. Even as they wandered further from the building, he stayed quiet. The strange young man picked a quiet little clearing between two large, old trees. He paused, looked around, and finally turned back to Grimmjow. "Here."

"Here it is, then." Grimmjow agreed, dropping the things he'd brought along. He handed Shiro a shovel as the boy carefully put the stone down.

Together they dug a single grave. They cut through roots and moved rocks out of the way. They dug until they were filthy and sweating, but they ended up with a grave deep enough that it was unlikely anything would dig the body up.

Then they headed back to the house, leaving behind their shovels and the makeshift headstone, bringing only the sheets and a tarp. Because he hadn't really been thinking straight when they'd rushed from the house the first time, Grimmjow had accidently kept the set of keys. It worked in their favor though, and he pulled the ring from his pocket so that he could unlock each of the deadbolts on the front door and they wouldn't be forced to carry Ichigo through the window.

This time, Grimmjow lead the way as they navigated through the dilapidated house. Shiro stayed close behind him and they neared Isshin's rotting body. There wasn't much that could be done for the deceased man after what was going on several weeks of his body being left to the elements. Grimmjow had first thought to torch the building, getting rid of all the evidence of what had happened, of how Shiro had been created, as well as bringing that little bit of rest and peace to the scientist's body, but such an act wouldn't go unnoticed. A fire large enough to burn down a house would draw unwanted attention. The body couldn't really be buried either, not at this point. That would have required Grimmjow and Shiro to carry it from the house. The bigger man wasn't fond of the idea of being covered in old blood and fluids and the smell of decay and he couldn't imagine putting the boy through that either. Even if the scientist had been insane, he had still been Shiro's father.

So Grimmjow did his best to ignore the smell as he neared and draped one of the white sheets over the body and the fluids that had dried upon the concrete around it. It was a small gesture, but it was the best he could think to do and it was better than nothing. Shiro watched quietly, a very small frown marring his brow.

After the few moments that took, they headed into the back room of the basement and looked upon Ichigo where the young man floated in his glass purgatory. His chest rose and fell in a mechanical way but no bubbles floated through the liquid bedding, his only source of air a tube that had been fed directly into his lungs. Set up on a shelf beside the odd tank, a heart monitor beeped a slow, steady cadence, too perfect, too regular. Next to it, photos of a younger Dr. Kurosaki and an orange haired little boy. Of a beautiful woman with kind features, of the three of them together, a happy little family. There was a photo of the woman, her belly swollen and her features rounded and pleasant. There were even copies of the ultra sounds. But there were no photos of the two babies. Nor of Shiro.

Grimmjow's features pulled downward. A tale of tragedy, a lifetime of suffering, sat in that small room.

The orange haired young man had been suspended just this side of death for longer than Shiro had even been alive. Years had passed since the news had flooded with the disappearance of Dr. Kurosaki and his comatose son.

A little torn on what was right, the bigger man pushed the cot located nearer the wall of the small room closer to the tank and climbed atop it. The lid wasn't sealed, but it was heavy. Carefully, he lifted it free and handed it over, making sure not to tug at any of the wires or tubes that snaked down into the tank from the monitors on the shelf.

Shiro took the lid from him, walking it over to a different shelf where it would be out of the way. Returning, he stood nearby and watched Grimmjow roll up his sleeves, immersing his hands into the fluid of the tank.

Brows furrowed, the big man tentatively reached into the imprisoning glass case. The liquid, clear like water but with more of a chemical smell to it, was surprisingly warm. It wasn't hot, but a tepid, just above room temp warmth. Grimmjow assumed that should he find a thermometer, it would read right around 98ºf, the temperature a healthy person's body typically held.

Carefully, gently, he hooked his hands under the still young man's arms. Pale, peach colored skin was soft below his hands, a softness that suggested lack of motion, lack of contact with air and anything abrasive. It wasn't exactly a healthy kind of smooth.

As Ichigo was drawn upward and freed of the weightlessness of submersion, his head lolled forward and Grimmjow grunted as he maneuvered to take the young man's weight better. He shifted motionless shoulders to his left, wrapping a thick arm carefully around Ichigo's upper half, while he reached further into the tank with his right to hook his arm under knees that were a little stiff from lack of motion and use.

By the time Grimmjow managed to maneuver Ichigo free of his suspended purgatory, he was soaked in the same fluid the young man had been. It soaked into his shirt, dripped from his hands and arms, but Grimmjow didn't really notice as he carefully climbed down from the cot, cradling the comatose man.

Shiro edged closer and reached out, pushing lanky, wet orange hair from features that very nearly matched his own. Grimmjow looked up at him, but there were no reassurances, no nerve-easing smiles or words of comfort between them as both looked back down at the man in Grimmjow's arms. In all the time it took Grimmjow to pull him free of the tank, in all the awkward, careful jostling, Ichigo hadn't moved, hadn't reacted. The monitors showing his heartbeat hadn't jumped or skipped. The too steady rise and fall of his chest hadn't fluttered. He was already gone, dead in all but technicalities. Had been for a long time now.

Turning back toward the cot, Grimmjow eased the young man down, careful with the way he let his weight rest upon the small bed. Taking a deep, steadying breath, he turned towards the monitors still keeping track of Ichigo's vitals. Blue eyes slid toward Shiro for a moment, watching as the boy almost timidly looked over the body he'd been cloned from, who he'd been created to die for. There was a tragic irony in that, and no justice could be found, nothing right about Ichigo's fate, or Isshin's. Or what Shiro's had nearly been.

Looking back to the monitors, Grimmjow tried to figure out exactly what it was that he was doing. It wasn't like in the movies, like it was always made out to be. There wasn't just one big switch that would shut everything down. There wasn't a plug to pull.

So he stepped back to Ichigo's side, kneeling beside the cot. Shiro moved to his side, watching. Always watching, observing.

The first thing Grimmjow did was remove the waterproof tape that had covered the needles that had been slid under sallow skin at the crook of Ichigo's elbow. It left behind a sticky residue from how long it'd been left to sit. Next, he carefully pulled free the IVs that had been feeding Ichigo's body with liquid nutrients and intravenous fluids.

Ichigo didn't move, didn't react as the needles were pulled from his flesh. With careful hands, Shiro reached over again and framed his copy's face with pale fingers. There was a disgruntled furrowing to ashen brows as he studied sleep-like features, but unlike a sleeping person, there was no sign of life, no movement of dreaming eyes below closed lids, no subtle pull of closed lips or signs of irritation.

Shiro sighed a small sound, "I'm sorry papapa an' I couldn't save you..." He whispered.

There was a tightening in Grimmjow's chest as he turned back to the monitors again. The next thing to go were the tubes that fed oxygen to the comatose young man. Grimmjow left the EKG hooked up, but found the switch for the sound, letting the low, steady beep stop.

Whatever hope there had been that he'd awaken when cut off from the life support keeping his body going quickly sank. As a few minutes ticked by, he waited with held breath for something to happen. Anything. But there still no reaction from Ichigo. He didn't cough or gasp for air. He didn't struggle. His chest just quit rising as the forced air was taken away.

The screen that showed brainwaves and brain activity had long since gone flat. In his madness and desperation, Isshin hadn't even noticed. Or perhaps he'd refused to notice. As they waited for something to happen, the heartbeat pulsing on a different screen steadily declined, weak even before Ichigo had been pulled from the tank.

Then it was over, and Ichigo was finally allowed to slip away quietly, gently.

Still they waited, letting silence settle over the small area. It was several more minutes before Grimmjow crouched next to Shiro. He rested a solid hand on the teen's shoulder and tugged him close to his side, before using his other hand to ease colorless hands away from sallow, still features.

Shiro didn't look at the bigger man, but he nodded and stood. Grimmjow took his place and began gently working his arms back under Ichigo's body as Shiro stepped up next to him, carrying the second white sheet they'd brought. Together, with careful maneuvering, they swaddled the body in clean, white fabric and left the basement.

After years of misguided care, years of wasting away, Ichigo deserved a proper burial. He deserved rest, an ending. They could do that much for him, at least.

He was given the closest thing to that Grimmjow and Shiro could give him without involving the authorities and outing Shiro's secret. The tarps were wrapped around Ichigo's sheet-swaddled body as a makeshift casket. Grimmjow passed his weight to Shiro just long enough to drop down into the grave they'd dug, then he took Ichigo back and carefully laid him out in the bottom.

It took them more than an hour to fill the grave, covering Ichigo's body and leaving him to his eternal sleep. The hand carved headstone was positioned at the very top of the grave, a simple marker that showed more kindness than Ichigo had been granted in years.

The walk back to the truck was silent and heavy. So was the drive back to Grimmjow's house.

••• a few months later •••

The sun was warm overhead, but not harsh. The air was clean and fresh from the coolness that came with night and the windows were down as they drove. Shiro, like usual, sat in the passenger seat, watching out the window. This time, it was buildings he watched go by, though.

Grimmjow chuckled as he looked over at him, an easy, pleased grin on his handsome features. His left arm stretched out, wrist settling over the steering wheel while his right hand sat on the gearshift.

The truck coasted through the small town, a half hour's drive from where they lived in Grimmjow's small house. The bigger man didn't need to ask to know that Shiro had never seen a city before, and he recognized the wonder in those strange, inverted eyes as Shiro looked around.

He'd been wary at first, to bring Shiro with him on his visits into town, but he couldn't keep the kid locked up forever. He deserved more than that. So when Shiro started moping around, eventually confessing that the new sketchbook Grimmjow had picked up for him was out of blank paper again, the bigger man decided it would be as good as any time to bring Shiro along. The boy was eager to pick out his own notebook.

Pulling into the parking lot of a decently sized connivance store, Grimmjow parked his truck and climbed out. Shiro tugged his seatbelt free and hopped from the passenger seat as well.

"Stick close, got it?" The bigger man issued, looking over as Shiro stepped up to his side. The last thing they needed was Shiro wandering off and drawing too much attention to himself by accident, or nosey people asking too many questions that the boy would ultimately answer too truthfully. "No wandering off like you do while we're at home."

"Ok!" Shiro nodded and grinned, all teeth and sparkling, strange eyes.

Grimmjow shook his head slightly, chuckling. Sometimes it was too easy to forget the boy was barely a handful of years old. While he weighed quite a bit less, Shiro was only a few inches shorter than Grimmjow and he packed a hell of punch in that littler body. He certainly wasn't a push over when his temper got the better of him, or when his strength was required for something Grimmjow needed help with around the yard. But he was still just a kid, and a sheltered one at that. He was smart though, Grimmjow was confident he'd pick up on how the real world worked quickly enough.

As they headed toward the entrance, Shiro's unique gaze drank in every new thing around him. Not only was the amount of concrete and buildings different from what he'd been introduced to previously, the larger scale of everything was new, and so too was the number of people around them.

A lopsided, half grin tugged at Grimmjow's handsome features as he watched. Reaching out, he ruffled white locks playfully, pulling the kid's attention away from their surroundings for a moment.

Shiro ducked from under his hand, turning a glare on the bigger man.

"Maybe we should get your hair cut while we're in town." Grimmjow chuckled, unscathed by the almost threatening look. In this case, he knew Shiro didn't actually mean anything more than displeasure by it. It didn't hold the same fire as when the boy's temper was rising.

In any case, the glare melted away into a wide-eyed look, pale brows arching, as Shiro shook his head and reached up to slide his black-nailed fingers through his shoulder length hair. "But I like it like this..."

"You like it long?" Grimmjow arched a blue brow as they walked through the parking lot.

"Mhmm!" Shiro nodded, "Papa always cut it short...but now I think he only did b'coz Ichigo's was short in all the pictures..." The pale boy shrugged a bit, still petting his hair, a repetitive motion over and over, "I like it like this better."

Understanding, Grimmjow nodded, "We'll leave it long, then." Shiro liked his hair long because it helped him stand out from the young man he'd been created in the image of. It helped him keep his own identity as his own person.

They fell quiet again as they stepped through the sliding doors and into the air conditioned building. For a few minutes, as Grimmjow guided them away from the grocery section and back towards the home and office supplies, the big man wondered if maybe he was going to have to rush the kid right back out again. It was a lot of new to take in. But Shiro wasn't easily overwhelmed and he merely looked around as they walked.

A moment later, a familiar voice called Grimmjow's name. The big man grinned as he started to turn toward an old acquaintance. He paused though, and looked back at Shiro, before pointing him in the right direction, "The notebooks are over in that aisle, why don't you go pick out one you like?"

"Ok!" Shiro smirked and nodded, heading off towards where Grimmjow had pointed, eager to have a new sketchbook without lines that he could draw in.

The blue haired man watched him disappear behind a shelf, before turning to a tall, thin man with dark hair and frameless glasses. He was only a couple years younger than Grimmjow himself, and had moved to the area a little over a year ago, claiming he needed a change of scenery after his home town had ceased feeling like home.

After meeting the man by happenstance one evening at the local bar and getting to know a bit about him, Grimmjow hadn't asked for details, but it sounded enough like old wounds were involved, the kind of hurt or tragedy that changed a person.

"Been a while, Ishida." Grimmjow grinned in friendly enough greeting.

The other let out a small, dignified, "Hmph," and adjusted his glasses, "Perhaps if you weren't such a hermit all the time."

Grimmjow laughed, "I'm a busy man, what can I say."

"Yes, I see that," Ishida said, his intelligent gaze sliding passed Grimmjow and in the direction a teenage boy had gone. He'd seen Grimmjow directing the lad before he'd walked up to the big loner. "I didn't know you had a kid."

"I don't..." Grimmjow looked taken aback for half a second before it clicked and he looked over his shoulder. Shiro was still mostly hidden from view, no doubt picking out just the right sketchbook. "He's-uh... my cousin's kid."

"Ah, so you got roped into babysitting?" Ishida smiled a bit at that, "It's a hard thing to imagine."

Grunting a laugh of his own, Grimmjow nodded, "Yeah, well. It's a rough situation. He's got no where else to go and he can't stay on his own."

Ishida arched a brow ever so slightly, and leaned a bit to look down the aisle the teen had wandered down. Shiro stood at the very end, looking around at the small stock of sketchbooks and pencils. Turned to look at the shelves, only his profile was visible, not his full features. Ishida looked back to Grimmjow, "He doesn't really look that young..." He stated, not really understanding why the kid needed someone to look after him constantly, the way Grimmjow seemed to be implying.

"Yeah, well," Even Grimmjow could hear how full of it he sounded, internally scrambling to make something up on the spot. He should have had all this figured out before he'd decided it would be ok to bring the strange boy along with him. "he's fourteen-?" Turning a bit to look over his should again, he too leaned around the corner of the shelving to glance at Shiro, "Shi? How old are you? Fourteen, right?"

Shiro looked up at the sound of his voice, a notebook in hand as he flipped through pages, despite that his attention had been drawn away from it. He frowned, holding up one hand with his fingers spread, "I'm five-"

"Fifteen! That's right," Grimmjow forced a grin back on his features and turned back to Ishida, "he just had a birthday not too long ago."

The thin man hummed a short sound and looked away from the pale teen with slightly furrowed brows, to look back at his acquaintance. He nodded a bit and adjusted his glasses again, pushing them further up his thin nose. "I'm starting to understand why he can't be left on his own..."

"Yeah..." Grimmjow grimaced a bit, knowing exactly what Ishida was thinking. It was the same he'd thought upon first finding the strange lad, "So he's staying with me for a while."

At that moment, Shiro returned, holding a new sketchbook out to show the man that had become his new guardian. "Grimmmm! C'n I have this one?"

Grimmjow chuckled at the excited way Shiro accidently dragged out his shortened name. The boy was a quick learner, but the repeating sounds still got him sometimes. Accepting the notebook, he made a show of looking it over as Shiro eagerly awaited his approval. "This is the one you like?"

"Yep." Shiro nodded, smirk slashing across his startling features. "What d'ya think? Is it ok?"

"If this is the one you want, you can have it." Grimmjow handed it back to waiting, colorless hands. "But I think you draw too much, we better pick out a second one too."

Pale features lit up excitedly at that, and Shiro started to turn, ready to go pick out another notebook as he cradled the first close. Before he could get away though, a big arm draped across his shoulders and turned him back to face forward again.

"This is a friend of mine, Shiro." Grimmjow started to introduce.

Shiro glanced at the indicated man with his customary smirk, only to find the dark haired stranger staring at him like he'd seen a ghost. A little unsure of what was going on, the boy looked from Ishida, to Grimmjow, and back again, his smile slowly dissolving into a light scowl.

Grimmjow looked equally confused as to what was going on.

It took Ishida a long moment to pull himself from his stunned stupor, and when he did, he cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses, dark eyes flashing to Grimmjow and back to the boy he'd called Shiro. "I-I'm horribly sorry," He excused himself, "you just...have an uncanny resemblance to a friend I grew up with back in Karakura..."

If Grimmjow paled a bit, blue eyes widening slightly, it went unnoticed.

"Oh," Shiro's smile returned, "Wha's his name? Maybe I could know 'im, Grimmjow promised ta introduce me ta friends."

A strained little chuckle escaped the dark haired man, "Oh no, you couldn't possibly know him. He passed away quite some time ago, when we were still in high school."

"Mmm..." Pale brows raised a bit, indicating that he understood. He didn't know what he was supposed to say to that, though, so he looked up to Grimmjow for clues.

Luckily, he was spared the effort, as Ishida spoke again. "It was nice seeing you Grimmjow, and wonderful meeting you, Shiro." He bowed very slightly, "But I should let you two return to your duties and continue mine."

"Uh-yeah, you too, Ishida." Grimmjow replied, his hold around Shiro's shoulders tightening just a bit, "We'll see ya around."

"Indeed." The dark haired male took his leave with the promise of talking later.

"Well shit..." Grimmjow muttered, steering Shiro back towards the sketchbooks and supplies, "C'mon, let's get that second book so we can head home and you can start drawing. Sound good?"

Shiro eagerly agreed and happily followed at the big man's side, none the wiser to what had transpired and protected by the man that had found him and taken him in.

He'd never again have to worry about going hungry, or being lonely. He'd never have to worry that his father's use for him had run out or that his creator would grow tired of him. He'd never be locked away again, hidden from the world and made into a lab rat, a ghost. Grimmjow treated him like a person and Shiro would be allowed to grow up and learn and be curious like any normal child.

The old house Dr. Kurosaki had turned into his prison was left to finish rotting, standing alone in the middle of an abandoned woods where it wouldn't draw attention. It sat as an unassuming statue, a monument to the horrors it had seen. Ichigo and Isshin were left as they were, never spoken of by those that had found and laid them to rest. The rest of the world could continue assuming that they had died long ago, continue believing that a grieving father had committed the kindest, hardest act he could for his suffering son.

* * *

**Thank you for reading~**

**I would love to hear what you thought of the story!  
**


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